Speech as Metaphor of Human Becoming According to St.

by Yana Filipenko

Institute for Christian Studies, 2000 Content

Explanatory Notes...... v

Latin-English Equivalent...... vi

Introduction...... vii

I. Ontological Relation of Being and Becoming when Mapped on to the Biblical Creator/Creation Distinction...... 1

1.1. Philo sophico-Historical Setting of Augustine’s Doctrine of Being and Becoming...... 1 Parmenides on Being...... 2 ’s Dualism...... 2 Plotinus and the One...... 3 Augustine’s Use of the Tradition...... 5 1.2. God as Being (esse) and Creator According to St. Augustine. Creation in the Order o f Being...... 5 God as Supreme Being...... 5 God as Trinity. Substantive and Relative Use of Trinitarian Attributes...... 6 Being of the Creation. as Measure of Existence. Substantive and Relative Use of “Truth”...... 7 Similitude and Likeness as Measure of Creaturely Being...... 10 Image/Likeness Character of Creaturely Existence...... 11 The Goodness of the Creation as a Possibility of Return. Nature/Grace Distinction When Applied to St. Augustine’s Hierarchy of Being...... 12 Augustine’s Reconciliation of the Creator/Creation Metaphysical Difference. The Notion of Becoming...... 14 Hierarchy of Being. Opposition as a Principle of Augustine’s Hierarchy of Being ...... 16 Augustine’s Appropriation of the Plotinian Doctrine of the One as a Principle of the Inferential Character Inherent in Corporeal ...... 17 Order and its Role in the Hierarchy of Being. Moral Order as an Underlying Principle of the Order of Being and Knowing...... 18 Reference as a Principle of Order. Things as S igna of Higher Reality...... 19 Rational Order as Order of Knowing...... 20 1.3. Being Creature or Becoming (exist* re) in the Order of Knowing According to St. Augustine...... 20 Human Being as an Image of God and a Rational Soul. Human Being Created to the Image of the Trinity...... 20 Mens as Image of God Proper...... 21 Trinitarian Images in M ens...... 22 of God in the Prelapsarian Condition of M ens...... 22 Mediation of Truth Through Senses and Signs of Corporeal Reality...... 22 Augustine’s Negative . The Fall of Complete Human Being by Will. Return to God Through Wilful Redirection of Mens. Definition of a Happy Life...... 23 Knowing as a Mode of Creaturely Being. Epistemic Acts as Creative Acts of Humans...... 24 Knowledge in an Enigma—the Postlapsarian Condition of Mens. Types of Knowledge: Scientia— Knowledge of Things Created; Sapientia— Redeemed Knowledge of God as Beatific Vision...... 25 Sense-...... 26 Incongruity Between Augustine’s and Neoplatonic Theories of Representation 28 Self-Knowledge as Means to the Knowledge of God...... 29 Sententia-—Internal Sense and Self-Recollection...... 30 Truth as the Key Concept in Augustine’s Epistemology of Becoming. Ascent or Assent?—Augustine’s Doctrine of Return...... 32 The Notion of Truth as Second Person of the Trinity...... 33 Augustine’s Doctrine of Revelation and Illumination. Proximity and Difference with the Neoplatonic Theory of Illumination...... 34 Vision and Speech as Landmarks of True Understanding...... 36 Illumination and Becoming...... 36 Recollection and Return According to St. Augustine...... 39

II. Augustine’s Sign-Theory as Linguistic Theory of Meaning Preserved and Actualized through Language...... 42

II. 1. Language as a Gift of God, and His Natural Sign...... 42 Liberal Arts...... 43 Three Senses of “Word” According to St. Augustine...... 45 Use/Enjoyment; and Means/End Distinctions...... 46 II.2. Sign-Theory Proper...... 48 Signum/Res Distinction...... 48 Types of Signs...... 49 Things and Types of Things...... 52 II. 3. Nature of the Relationship Between: a Sign and a Thing; and Between a Sign and a Speaker (the Process of Cognition)...... 54 Origin of Meaning...... 54 Problem of Learning...... 55 Sign/Thing Relationship. Allegorical and Ontological Relationships According to St. Augustine...... 56 Sign/Speaker Relationship...... 57 II.4. Augustine’s Use ofVerbum...... 59 Verbum Mentis...... 60

III. Theory of Interpretation as Theory of Reference...... 65

III..1. Reference as Basic Relationship in the Order of Being and Knowing...... 65 Linguistic Meaning of Signs and Ontological Meaning of Things...... 68 Transformational Power of Allegories...... 68 Allegory According to St. Augustine...... 69 IV

111.2. Signification in the Creation by Obscuring the Truth. Allegorical Relation Between Things as Signs—Vestiges of the Creator, and the Truth they Reveal to Human Understanding...... 70 Types of Allegory...... 70 111.3. Rule o f Faith...... 72 Obscurity as Means of True Interpretation...... 72 of Truth...... 73 Intention of the Writer and Spiritual Understanding. Interpretation as an Art of Discernment...... 74 Scripture as the Firmament of Authority and Narrative of the Journey to God. Interpretation of Scripture as Primary Task of the Rule of Faith...... 75 Faith as Mode of Knowing...... 77 The Language of the Scripture and its Role: Conversion of the Unbelievers, Spreading the Word to the People, Practicing the Rule of Faith...... 77

IV. Speech as Metaphor of Human Becom ing...... 81

IV.1. Speech as Creative Act of God—Order of Being...... 82 Speech as Creative Power of God— Christ, Second Person of the Trinity, Word of God by Whom Creation Came into Existence...... 82 IV.2. Purpose of Existence, i.e. Meaning Inherent in the Creation—Order of Knowing...... 83 Christ as Incarnate Word Reveals Meaning to Human Understanding; Is a Sign of God’s Presence to the World...... 86 Creation as a Sign of God’s Speech and Revelation. Meaning is Hidden from Fallen M ens...... 91 IV. 3. Characteristics of Human Language and Their Role in Human Becoming... 95 Language as Temporality. Augustine’s Notion of Tim e...... 95 Speech/Language Distinction...... 100 IV.4. Redeemed Speech as Express Likeness of the Incarnate Word—Order of Becoming...... 103 IV. 5. Silence as the End o f Human Becom ing...... 105 Silence as Means of Revelation, and Condition and Possibility for Meaning to Take Place...... 105 Silence as Means of Recollection and Internal Conversion...... 107 Silence as Condition of Vision Proper and the Mode of Eternal Becoming.... 108

Conclusion...... I l l

Bibliography 115 Explanatory Notes

DBV - De beata vita; DCD - De ci vitate Dei; DD - De dialectica;

DDC - De doctrina Christiana; DFR - De fide rerum quae videntur; DGadL - De Genesi ad litteram; DGadM - De Genesi aduersus manichaeos; DIA - De immortalitate animae; DLA - De libero arbitrio; DO - De ordine; DQA - De quantitate animae; DT - De Trinitate; DUC - De utilitate credendi; DVR - De uera religione. vi

Latin-English Equivalent

Contra Académicos - Answer to Skeptics; De beata vita - The Happy Life; De civitate Dei - The City of God Against the Pagans; De dialéctica - On Dialectic; De doctrina Christiana - On Christian Teaching; De fide rerum quae non videntur - On Faith in Things Unseen; De Genesi ad litteram - On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis; De Genesi aduersus manichaeos - Genesis Against the Manichees; De immortalitate animae - The Immortality of the Soul; De libero arbitrio voluntatis - On Free Choice of the Will; De Magistro - The Teacher; De música - On Music; De ordine - Divine Providence and The Problem of Evil; De quantitate animae - The Magnitude of the Soul; De Trinitate - The Trinity; De uera religione - Of True Religion; De utilitate credendi - On the Profit of Believing. Introduction

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard...The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple; the statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes... Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, or Lord, my strength and my Redeemer Psalm 19 Saint Augustine (354 A.D.— 430 A.D.): a Roman North African teacher of Rhetoric, who converted to Christianity and became a bishop of Hippo. His philosophico-theological writings reflect the constant struggle between the influence o f his education and his religious orientation. His was a classical education in Rhetoric, Grammar, and . However, after his conversion he reevaluated these disciplines and subjected all learning to the interpretation of the Scriptures as the story o f the creation existing in relationship to its Creator, or in other words, as the book of life. Such a shift was not easy and required a sacrifice on his part, resulting in a complete change of career, from professorate to priesthood. Augustine never abandoned his rhetorical background and used it in his writings as a meditative philosophic tool. Whereas the main purpose of his Christian orientation appears to be clear, his scholarly discourse is not presented in the systematic way, as we understand to be constitutive of “theory” and “discourse” in modern terms. In other words, his enquiry is not argumentative, and does not intend to be consistent. One of the reasons is that it is a life-long project. Having produced a massive body of philosophic and religious writings, he does not write as a scholar, but as an instructor of the way to righteous living in God with others1. In this Thesis I primarily intend to emphasize the Christian orientation of Augustine’s general philosophical thought. The chosen topic reflects this intention. The notion of speech as metaphor of human becoming comes from the Scriptures. It specifically refers to the story of Genesis— the act of creation of the world by the

1 For Augustine’s biography see Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: a Biography. London: Faber, 1967; and Hadot, Pierre. as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault; edited by Arnold Davidson; translated by Michael Chase. Oxford; New York: Blackwell, 1995 Vlll

Word, i.e. Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, Wisdom creating. Augustine takes this story as the basis for his metaphysical inquiry. Despite his effort to follow the scriptural story-line, he makes extensive use of the Neoplatonic philosophic tools available at the time, in order to build a . Such an approach creates a tension from the start. Philosophy traditionally was associated with the Greek school of thought, i.e. pagan in nature. To create a Christian philosophy based on pagan thought is a contradiction in terms. Nonetheless, Augustine takes the challenge and subordinates his entire career to this difficult task. It can hardly be denied that he constructed his general philosophic project with the help of Neoplatonic philosophic tools. Nonetheless, he does depart from on some crucial issues. With this in mind I give a brief account of the Neoplatonic and epistemology in Chapter One, and outline the points where Augustine differs from the tradition. I demonstrate that Augustine places the tradition of Parmenides-Plato-Plotinus, juxtaposing Being and becoming within a deeper horizon, namely that of the Scriptural story of Creation—Fall— Redemption. I begin with an account of the metaphysical doctrine and ascesis of the tradition, and then show how and why Augustine develops from it, in particular, how that story transforms God/Being as well as creature/becoming. Thus the Being of Plato and Plotinus takes on a Christian identity of Trinity as Supreme Being, where the latter shares the characteristics of the former, i.e., , immutability, indivisibility, eternity, self-identity, and self-knowledge. However, there are important differences. Augustine argues that God is the Creator of the universe. From that follows that the creation came into existence and is not of eternal nature. Augustine’s Creator is the supreme Knower and possesses being, unlike the One of Plotinus. These and other arguments are brought out in I.I.2 Having shown that Being and becoming take on a transformed identity and relationship in Augustine’s scriptural philosophy I shift to a closer look at becoming, i.e. the mode of creaturely being. Having established different views on the question o f the creation’s being or non-being2,1 demonstrate that Augustinian creation is not the Platonic world of sensibles, but is rather a fallen creation of the Bible, that sustains the traces of its original perfect state in temporality, i.e. its ability to resemble the Truth. I proceed with the description of the categories image/likeness, and good/evil, all with a view to establishing Augustine’s “linguistic turn” in his , epistemology and . The characteristics of proper being, i.e. unity, form and order, only relatively3 present in the fallen creation, retain the possibility of its perfection and subsequent redemption through the Incarnate Verbum. This, in turn, sets up the basis for Augustine’s theory of reference, which presupposes a more dynamic relationship between the Creator and His creation4. Due to his scriptural orientation, Augustine distinguishes three orders as the basis of creaturely existence, i.e. the order of nature, rational and moral orders, which altogether form a totality, and if recognized provide one with the characteristics of true being, namely—being, knowledge, and love. In addition to naming the mode of being proper to the creation, the notion of becoming is primarily identified in Augustine with human beings created to the image and likeness of the Creator. With human beings as becoming we enter a different set o f relationships, i.e. that of an epistemological relationship between humans as intelligent, moral creatures and God. This relationship is also based on the principle of reference, where God is the object of human intentions and desires, and the only proper object of knowing. Due to their special capacity to be, to know and to love their Creator, human beings can participate in all three orders. Augustine appropriates the dualism of Plato and Plotinus in respect to a human being, and distinguishes between body and mind/soul of humans. Mind/soul is an undifferentiated concept, and is thus expressed in this thesis in its Latin version, as mens. It is important to note that according to Augustine, only mens has been created to the image and likeness of the Creator. Human body in its physical form is the postlapsarian acquisition of humans. Having established the metaphysical basis, I proceed with Augustine’s epistemology in I.I.3. After the Fall a human being is separated from the supreme Truth by the veil of his or her temporal and mutable condition. Therefore, all knowledge is mediated through the signs of corporeal reality. Augustine develops a negative epistemology of the knowledge of God. He argues that in the fallen condition God cannot be known, only revealed to human understanding. He distinguishes

2 See Gilson’s and my account of the problem on P. 7 3 See the substantive/relative distinction introduced by D.W. Johnson on P. 6 4 See the discussion on P. 17 X between scientia, the knowledge of things created, and sapientia, the redeemed knowledge of God. The latter is what a human being ultimately desires, and what he/she anticipates in the restored condition of creaturely perfection. Augustine does not undermine sense-perception and self-knowledge as valuable tools of the knowledge of God. He connects them with the epistemic acts of knowing the truth5. However, unlike Plato and Plotinus who discuss human epistemology in terms of ascent to the Intelligible Ideas, Augustine emphasizes intentionality as an important aspect of the knowledge of God, namely assent to the truth, which is closer to the Christian notion of covenant. Truth is not an object of thought, for him, but a goal of human return to the original state of creaturely perfection, a realm to abide in. It is helpful to distinguish, though, Augustine’s use of Truth as the second person of the Trinity, and as the knowledge revealed to human understanding. Augustine follows the Platonic notion of illumination as a source of knowledge proper. However, there is a significant difference. Augustine grounds his notion of illumination in the Incarnate Word. For Plato, the mind is illumined as it approaches the truth above. In Augustine, however, it is the Truth Himself descending to the fallen creation in order to reveal the eternal truth. On the one hand, illumination is closer to the notion of revelation. While, on the other hand, it is not an end in and of itself, but rather it is a technique for obtaining knowledge by means of creative acts of becoming, one of which is faith, i.e. an ontological condition and epistemological readiness to receive truth while still in the fallen condition. Another creative act of becoming, according to St. Augustine, is internal speech. This notion is associated with Christ, the Incarnate Word. If illumination is not a movement upward, in Augustine, it is definitely a movement inward, within human mens, where, as he argues, the Internal Teacher uncovers the hidden meaning of truth, which I connect with speech as the creative power of God. Illumination as described above brings recollection, or willful revaluation of one’s life, which results in personal transformation and the life of virtue, in the aptitude for beatific vision of eternity in the life to come. Augustine is primarily interested in the question of human cognition as a condition of the knowledge of God. However, the question is not limited to the problem of human epistemology, but is subordinated to a metaphysical problem of

5 See the discussion on sense-perception on P. 25 meaning, that is associated with the question of existence, in general, and of order intended in the universe. He views this question within his theory of signification, which is the focus of the discussion in Chapter Two. Although linguistic in nature, this theory transcends its linguistic boundaries and presents a broader spectrum of issues connected with the theme of becoming. Augustine that if we observe the way meaning unfolds in language, i.e. in temporality, we might be able to find a pattern according to which created things point to the Creator, thus revealing the overall meaning intended by God in the act of creation. According to Marcia Colish’s suggestion, the disciplines of the Trivium— Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectic— are used by Augustine to accomplish this philosophic task. Grammar provides linguistic rules according to which language, and by extension human cognition operates. Rhetoric is concerned with the correct transference of meaning, i.e. truth. And Dialectic reveals the hidden relationship between things and signs in the hierarchy of being and knowing, and constitutes the very rule of thought. Each of the disciplines of the Trivium establishes a degree of necessity, which prompts the mind to recognize the truth. According to Donald Daniels’ suggestion, in II.I.l I introduce three levels of discourse, which govern Augustine’s theory of signification, i.e. sensible, conceptual and spiritual discourses. According to this useful classification, we can distinguish between a properly linguistic theory of signification and the metaphysical theory of reference6. The former is the first-level discourse sign, still it leads the mind to the apprehension of the third-level discourse sign, which signifies the ontological relationship between things in the hierarchy of being, with God as its end. Further I proceed with the discussion of such notions as means/end, use/enjoyment, which help to determine the nature of relationship between things and signs in Augustine’s theory o f signification. To determine the sign-theory proper, in Augustine, in II.II.2 I discuss the s ignumlres distinction, types of signa and of res, all with the view to establishing how knowledge of God is possible when mediated through signs, and how mens could transcend them. Augustine hopes to resolve this problem by addressing the issue of the origin of meaning. The question for him is, whether meaning is inherent in the world, or whether the human mind conveys meaning to reality. For that purpose, he

6 This distinction is introduced by R.A. Markus and is discussed in detail on P. 44 xii introduces a triadic relationship between a sign and a thing, and a sign and a speaker. While the first relationship is natural, i.e. meaning is divinely constituted, and can only be discovered by humans, the second relationship is hermeneutical in nature, where meaning is intended by the speaker or interpreted by the listener. Both types of relationships are discussed in II.II.3. What is emphasized, however, is that those relationships are interactive. While discovering the true meaning, significant of the Creator/creation relationship, with the help of the Interior Teacher, human beings learn to perform their own creative acts. Among such creative acts one is an ability to interpret metaphorically, with the view for spiritual meaning. Another creative act, according to Augustine, is confessional speech, i.e. praise of God as the condition proper to humans in the fallen creation. Beside the question of the origin of meaning, he concerns himself with the problem of learning. He follows Plato’s position, namely that we recall rather than learn. However, he rejects the pagan theory of reminiscence. Rather he argues that humans recognize the truth within and give their assent to it. Further I give a detailed account of the aforementioned triadic relationship, in Augustine. Based on R.A. Markus’s suggestion I argue that, although the distinction between a sign and a thing, and a sign and a speaker is very helpful and innovative, Augustine does not distinguish between words and objects of reality, but rather treats them as res, thus conflating linguistic and extralinguistic meanings. Augustine does, however, distinguish three uses of verbum, as utterance or uttered word (vox, verbum vocis); nomen, and verbum mentis. All three are discussed in II.II.4. Special treatment is given to verbum mentis. The “word,” in Augustine, is a purely mental moral entity that discerns, and is a place of the mind’s encounter both with things in the world and God within. I suggest the use of verbum as a moral category of human cognition on the way toward becoming a true image of God. Chapter Three is primarily dedicated to Augustine’s theory of interpretation as theory of reference of a human being to the Scripture, the Scripture to the Creator, a human being to the Creator and other human beings, and the whole creation to the Creator. I suggest in III. 1 that by interpreting and invoking the Scriptures a human being learns to recognize the true meaning of the purpose of one’s existence. Moreover, the Scripture does not just connote a Creator/creation relationship in the text of the Bible. Rather, the whole totality of human experience in the world unfolds as a significant whole, whose signs need to be interpreted and analyzed by mens. The xiii Scripture as the Word of God shares a similar purpose in the process of human becoming an imago Dei with the Incarnate Word. It is a locus of Light, which orients human beings in the transient world, and saves them from further dispersion. The Living Word provides humans with the opportunity to return to the world equipped for a virtuous life with other human beings in God. This theme is developed in stages. First, I establish the connection between Augustine’s theory of signification and his theory of reference, suggesting that the former serves as the basis for the latter. Having established the connection between these two theories, I suggest that Augustine uses allegory as the basis of signification o f eternity in temporality. Here I introduce Margaret Ferguson’s discussion on present as literally absent. Thus I proceed with the notions of presence and absence as signs of God’s involvement in the creation, and of the way meaning is revealed to human understanding. Augustine conceives all of creation as a vestige of the Creator that ultimately signifies eternity. He draws a comparison with the narrative unfolding in time, an overflowing plenitude of meaning of spiritual life. On the part of the soul, an ability to interpret things figuratively, or as vestiges of the presence of God, determines the degree of spiritual change in the soul, and thus its transformation. This theme is discussed in the sections on Transformational Power of Allegories and Allegory According to St. Augustine. What Augustine is trying to establish in the course of interpretation is the knowledge of God by analogy with the knowledge of the creation, which acquired the title of negative theology. Chapter III.2 opens with the discussion on the allegory and types of allegories. Having determined that allegory is the basis of ontological relationships between things as vestiges of God and the truth they reveal to human understanding, I proceed with the theory of interpretation proper. The goal of all interpretation is to discover the true meaning. However, Augustine asks a set of important questions, namely— what determines the truth of the discovered meaning, can fallen mens reach understanding at all, and if so how much of it can human language convey. He introduces several obstacles on the way to true interpretation, namely— the cultural, historical and linguistic barriers that exist between people, multiple ways of expressing the truth in language, etc. Augustine suggests that the multiplicity of interpretations is an inevitable result of the fallen condition of mens, and of the fact that truth is hidden from humans. xiv I argue that interpretation, in Augustine, is an art of discernment between a sign and a thing in the hierarchy of being, and not a of knowledge. Every thing can signify on three levels of discourse, and it is mens that discerns the God-instituted significance of things. Augustine proposes the rule of faith as the basis of spiritual interpretation7. Section III.3 opens with obscurity as a sign of true interpretation. According to him, God purposefully obscures the truth in allegories in order to humble humans and subordinate them to the authority of His word, which demands and charity. Augustine believes that complete subordination to the way of righteous living, laid out in the story of the Bible, brings a human being to the faith of God and to the confession of one’s sins, and therefore to their forgetfulness. This, in turn, creates a condition and possibility for true meaning to be revealed and understood by the human mens. Understanding brings transformation of a personal life and, respectively, o f the communal practices. According to Mark Jordan’s suggestion, hermeneutical exercise as a way of life embodies the intention behind the Scriptural signs8, thus revealing their meaning. Marcia Colish outlines another aspect of Scriptural exegesis, namely— spreading the Word to the world, thus extending the firmament of Scriptural authority over the faithful community. In Chapter Four I proceed with the theme of speech as metaphor of human becoming, which is the key theme in this Thesis. In the previous Chapters I have established the metaphysical, epistemological and hermeneutical framework of Augustine’s general discourse with being and knowing, and we can add, signifying as its key concepts. There is a third concept that completes Augustinian philosophic project, that is love, i.e. a driving force of human intentionality. In Chapter Four I relate speech and the creative power and acts of God, and a mode of human becoming an imago Dei. I start Section IV. 1 with the discussion of the specifics of speech as a creative act of God by which the creation came into existence. Further I discuss speech as creative power of God, i.e. supreme Verbum, second person of the Trinity, by whom and through whom the creation exists and is redeemed. Section IV.2 reviews the question of meaning as God-instituted purpose for the creation. Human cognition when practiced in a right mode serves as a response to

7 According to Mark Jordan’s suggestion I have distinguished between “linguistic rule” and the “rule of faith” as a condition and possibility of interpretation and knowledge of God in Augustine. 8 See the discussion on P. 76 XV

God’s will, revealed to humans by Christ, the Interior Teacher through the creation and the events in one’s life. Christ is viewed in here as the supreme Sign of God’s presence to the world. I give an outline of the suggested characteristics of the supreme Verbum as the sign of God9, all with the view to establishing a connection between Verbum as a sign of God and His actualized speech to the humanity. Further I discuss Mark Jordan’s suggestion that Christ as the perfect sign restores the inferential power o f human language as a natural sign to point to the Creator/creation relationship. Thus, by performing their own creative acts, human beings can reach God within, in the inner man, which is the imago Dei proper. However, what a human being gains is not intelligible ideas, but the vision of God in the light of the supreme Verbum. Beside self-knowledge as a source of the knowledge of God, a human being might want to seek God in the creation, which, as I argue, is a sign of God’s speech and revelation. This can be achieved by way of a hermeneutical exercise, discussed previously in Chapter Three, and reviewed here, with a view to providing an example o f Augustine’s speech analogy. I suggest that if viewed as a significant whole, the creation is not representative of eternity, but rather reflects eternity by being its true image. The eternal meaning is not contained in the fallen creation, but is communicated in it. The nature of the relationship between the two, thus, is not of representation, but of analogy10. In IV.3 I outline basic characteristics of language and their role in human becoming. Time and temporality are fundamental features of human language, and if compared can shed light on the way language preserves the totality of meaning and thus of being in the fallen creation. I primarily base my discussion on the Confessions XI. To give an outline, I distinguish between time as a boundary between eternity and the corporeal realm of being, i.e. as a metaphysical category; as a mode of human existence, i.e. as an extension of the mind that orients and preserves the coherence of human life-experience in temporality; as an order- and meaning-giving preserving faculty of the development of the Creator/creation relationship that directs the process o f becoming. Further I proceed with the speech/language distinction, which is specifically helpful in the context of the topic of the discussion.

9 See P. 83 10 See the discussion on Pp. 87-91 xvi Section IV .4 sheds light on the connection between speech and the process of becoming proper. I follow Marcia Colish’s notion of redeemed speech as an outcome o f a revealed wisdom. Colish stresses the crucial role of redeemed speech as mediator between God and humans, or, in her own words, as a mirror that reflects God in temporality, and anticipates the vision of God in the life to come. However, the outcome of the restored power of the creative acts, which is, supposedly, identical with human intention to obey the Lord, is the confessional speech of the heart, expressed in the notion of silence in Augustine. Properly speaking, it is silence that is indicative of the proper mode of creaturely being, and the end of human becoming. However, it is silence only if viewed in temporality, in eternity it is a direct vision of God and an abundance of His spiritual meaning. Silence is a very pregnant notion in Augustine. In IV.5 I propose two uses of silence—as means of revelation, and condition and possibility for meaning to take place, and as means of recollection and internal conversion. The first one is significant of the sensible character of silence, i.e. as an interval of time. It is precisely by separation of the linguistic phrase that the totality of its meaning is revealed to human perception. I suggest an analogy of presence/absence, introduced by M. Ferguson, as the basis of this quality of silence. Although the temporal world is inferior to the eternity, the latter can still be revealed in temporality through the sublime signs. Thus, if properly read by the human mind, those non-verbal signs can orient humans in temporality, preparing them for the apprehension of eternity. Beside signifying eternity in temporality, silence serves, in Augustine, as a means of recollection and internal conversion. Augustine often emphasizes the impossibility of linguistic connotation of God in temporality. However, he also stresses the role of the confessional speech in the human epistemology as a powerful tool of conversion and ontological orientation toward God. Augustine does speculate on the issue of the renewed state of creaturely perfection, which is his mode of eternal becoming. As I suggest in the last section, Augustinian becoming is a mode of eternal exploration and enjoyment of God as an end in the hierarchy of being, and an object of human knowing and loving. A human being as God’s similitude can recognize and respond to the harmony of the created xvii order. Through my entire thesis I suggest speech as the root metaphor11 of this condition.

11 See the discussion on root-metaphor on P. 44 I. Ontological Relation of Being and Becoming when Mapped on to the Biblical Creator/Creation Distinction

1.1. Philosophico-Historical Setting of Augustine’s Doctrine of Being and Becoming I will argue that Augustine’s general metaphysical framework is grounded in the biblical story of creation. It is within this general framework that he elaborates the notions of being and becoming. Nevertheless, it can hardly be denied that he constructed his general framework with the help of Neoplatonic philosophic tools. What results is a complex inter-relationship between Augustine’s theory of being and becoming, and a consistently Neoplatonic use of the same terms. This fact alone suggests I begin with the briefest account of the Neoplatonic notion of being, an account that claims no originality for itself whatsoever. Many commentators have pointed out the significant influence of the Neoplatonic metaphysics on Augustine’s philosophy1. They emphasize Augustine’s personal acquaintance with the tradition and his consequent appropriation of certain notions into his generally Christian philosophy of being. There are of course those like G.A. McCool, who insists that this Neoplatonic influence is mediated by the teachings of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, who had a great impact on Augustine’s philosophical formation2. In any case, most scholars now agree that Augustine’s views are primarily Christian in nature, and are grounded in the biblical story of creation. Indeed, a scholar like Etienne Gilson goes as far as to exclude Augustine from the Neoplatonic tradition altogether3. In this thesis I will argue that Augustine develops his philosophy within the scriptural dynamic of Creation— Fall—Redemption, and appropriates within that context the Neoplatonic metaphysical and epistemological doctrine of being, becoming, and knowing.

1 See Armstrong, A.H. (ed). Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967; Gilson, Etienne. The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine. New York: Random House, 1960; Colish, Marcia L. The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge. Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983; McCool, Gerard A. “The Ambrosian Origin of St. Augustine’s Theology of the Image of God in Man.” In Theological Studies 20 (1959). Pp. 65-81; Teske, R. “The Image and Likeness of God in St. Augustine’s De Genesi ad Litteram Liber Imperfectas.” In Augustinianum 30 (1990). Pp. 441-451. 2 McCool, Gerard A. op. cit. P. 65 3 Gilson, Etienne. Being and Some Philosophers. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1949. P. 31 2 Parmenides on Being Any account of the Neoplatonic doctrine of being and becoming properly starts with Parmenides, who was the first to define Being as the first principle of everything that is. According to him, being has no beginning and no end. It is eternal, has no structure and no division, and is everywhere continuous and equal, immovable, and necessary. The world that humans know and live in does not possess these characteristics of Being. That world is the effect of prior causation and possesses the characteristics of plurality, diversity, and mutability4. The mind of a human being belongs to this latter world of change. Consequently, it can know Being only by excluding what it knows of the world he or she lives in. And so it was that Parmenides was forced to conclude that, if existence is something that belongs to the world of change and being does not, these must be two different categories. Thus the distinction of being and existence appeared, identifying being with the first principle, and existence with the world of change, passing in time. Moreover, in the metaphysics of Parmenides being is identified with the proper object of thought. This is a claim which will recur later in the course of our discussion.

Plato’s Dualism Plato, in his turn, treats being and existence as opposites, and identifies being with reality proper, or the “really real.” However, he acknowledges that existent things have a complex relationship with Being, and differ among each other as to the degree of selfhood and unity of their nature. Thus, he develops a hierarchy of being which has a vertical and horizontal structure. According to his horizontal structure there is a realm of ideas, or intelligibles proper, followed by a mediating realm of mathematicals, and a realm of physicals, or sensibles. The realm of ideas possesses the characteristics of Parmenidean Being, while the world of sensibles is called matter and can only be thought of as non-being. In Plato’s vertical structure, he distinguishes between the One qua Being, the principle of self-identity and immutability, and the Indefinite Dyad, the principle of plurality and diversity. Reality, in a broad sense, is constituted by a constant rivalry between universal principles of being and non-being, which are sometimes compared with the Christian notions of good and evil5.

4 This summary of the Neoplatonic tradition owes much to Etienne Gilson’s philosophical anatomy of the tradition in Being and Some Philosophers. P. 1-41 5 Suggested by A.H. Armstrong in Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, op. cit. P. 19 3 In Plato’s metaphysics the lower realms of being are influenced by the higher ones. Nevertheless, the Christian question regarding the origin of the universe did not occur to Plato or his followers. Ideas simply are as is matter. Ideas influence the formation of the sensible world. Rather, the closest Plato could come to the question of origin was to ground Being, and/or the realm of Ideal Forms in an absolutely transcendent principle. Thus, for Plato Being was not the first principle like it had been for Parmenides. The relationship between the realm of being, with its characteristics of intelligibility, immutability, unity and self-identity; and of non- being possessing opposite characteristics exercised Plato. In the Timeaus he sought to explain how the two opposite realms were related, or better how it was that the realm o f being acted upon the realm of non-being. For it was clear to him that the intelligibility of material entities depended entirely upon the realm of Ideal Forms for its existence.

Plotinus and the One The tradition as Augustine confronted it reached its maturity with Plotinus. As A.H. Armstrong points out, “the thought of Plotinus in many ways continues along lines laid down by his predecessors” 6. But Plotinus’s views were still unique for Greek philosophy and particularly for Greek religion. Plotinus had read Plato and the Platonists in a very peculiar way and developed some of the more exceptional ideas in Plato. Whereas Plato struggled with the question of being as a supreme principle of all that is, and separated being and existence in order to underline the changeless character of the world of ideas, Plotinus introduced the category of the One as the ground of pure Being, thus placing it above both Being and existence. For Plotinus the world of Being, that is of ideas and the Intelligence per se belong to the same realm of that which is, while the One is the ground of that world of Being. The One, being placed above the realm of Intelligibles, or Ideas and Intelligence, is thus unknowable, but rather serves as a basis, or condition and possibility for everything else to be and to be known. Like Plato who emphasized the hierarchical relationship between intelligibles and sensibles and their mediators, Plotinus stresses a necessity of order and life in the universe. Unlike Plato, who does not develop his own thought that ideas possess the

6 The account of Plotinus’s views is mainly dependent upon A.H. Armstrong’s article in Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy. P. 195. 4 characteristics of being, movement, rest, identity and diversity, Plotinus takes these five elements to be the basis of his hierarchy of being. For Plotinus the order is eternal, and is in a constant state of going forth and return, i.e. disintegration and unity. Being and life are always in unity. In that he differs from Plato, when he underlines that the changeless and eternal character of being does not imply lifelessness. In him being, life and thought are always linked together to show that Intellect is a single reality, that is— the only real thing, “the fullness of life, and the perfection of intuitive thought which is identical with its object”7. His whole approach to being and the realm of eternal ideas seems to be more mobile than, say it is for Plato. As A.H. Armstrong notes, “the difference of essence in the immaterial world does not exclude, and in fact demands, co-presence and interpenetrability of the different entities, so that they can be at once really one and really different”8. Such interaction is possible due to the transcendent nature of the One. Plotinus holds very interesting views on the human being as duality of soul and body. These views are important for the study of Augustine. He stresses the primary goodness of the soul, which, in his view exists eternally and is constantly illumined by the Intellect, which is always present to the soul, even though it is not always aware of that presence. He divides a human being into “man within” and the “other man,” i.e. the physical body, which is not a real being. Later Plotinus distinguishes the third part of human being, namely discursive reason, which he calls “we,” or our true self which, according to him, should transcend thought itself in order to come in union with its very source, the One or the Good. The One cannot be known, but the soul can still participate in it. In fact, it does so without being aware of it. Like Augustine as we shall see, Plotinus holds the position that knowledge per se does not come through senses, but through the soul by virtue of its direct contact with the Intellect. The soul makes judgements concerning sense-experience and regulates the body in accordance with them. Although Plotinus does not talk of the “redemption” of the soul, he does introduce the necessity of the return of the soul to its proper source—the Good or the One. Both Plato and Plotinus share a hierarchy of being, in which the lower possesses its being by way of participation in the higher reality of the intelligible forms, which serve as archetypes of all existent things. As mentioned earlier, Plotinus

7 Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy. P. 246. 5 grants more mobility to his notion of being. Moreover, diversity was not a problem for him. Rather it is an inseparable part of unity, just as otherness is an inseparable part of sameness. Nevertheless he, like Plato holds the view that the changeable realm of becoming—passing in time and form—is a mere imprint or imperfect likeness of the immutable world of Ideas. It seems to me that the very term “becoming” implies coming into being, and is thus of a lower order than being itself, which has not been caused by anything, and thus has never been subject to change. However, for Plotinus there also exists a possibility of another type of becoming, namely of the transcendent orientation of the soul toward its source of existence. The hierarchy of being per se, for both philosophers, is a fixed pattern. Nonetheless, in Plotinus’s philosophy the soul belongs to the higher reality, to start with, and therefore its process of “becoming” does not involve metaphysical transformation but an intellectual ascent to that higher reality where the soul already is. Moreover, Plotinus’s notion of becoming applies only to the human being. Augustine, as we will see understands becoming to be the mode of return of the entire creation to its Creator. Becoming thus acquires the characteristic of positive transformation, i.e. a creature becomes a true similitude9.

Augustine’s Use of the Tradition There have been many debates as to the degree to which Neoplatonic metaphysics influenced Augustine’s philosophical thought. I argue that although Augustine appropriates the general framework of Plato’s and Plotinus’s philosophy of dual reality, his entire philosophy can be treated within, i.e. be subjected to the biblical Creator/creation distinction. In general terms, then the influence of the Neoplatonic tradition should be restricted to that of a stimulus to the development of Augustine’s own conceptual framework of thought.

1.2. God as Being (esse) and Creator According to St. Augustine. Creation in the Order of Being

God as Supreme Being Augustine borrows the Neoplatonic identification of Being with simplicity, immutability, indivisibility, eternity, self-identity (or self-sameness), and self- knowledge. Nonetheless, Augustine has a different perception of supreme Being. Following the scriptural story of creation, his supreme Being is not a first principle

8 Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy. P. 248. 9 See the discussion on P. 20 6 which underlines the whole of the universe as a fixed foundation for the hierarchical order of being, but is a Creator of the world, which, according to the Bible, was once caused into existence by God from nothing10.

the Father through the Son in the gift of the Holy Spirit together made all things and every particular thing. For every thing, substance, essence or nature, or whatever better word there may be, possesses at once these three qualities: it is a particular thing; it is distinguished from other things by its own proper form; and it does not transgress the order of nature11. Moreover, In De civitate Dei XI.4 Augustine argues that, the world was created in time. This is the first break with the Neoplatonic tradition, which holds to the eternal nature of the cosmos.

God as Trinity. Substantive and Relative Use of Trinitarian Attributes The second point that separates Augustine from the Neoplatonists properly speaking is that God is a Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In spite of its triune nature, he emphasizes the essential oneness of the Trinity. The Trinity is “simple 1 because it is what it has,” namely “each of these is a full substance and all together are one substance...these three have the same eternal nature, the same unchangeableness, the same majesty, the same power”13. The persons of the Trinity are co-eternal, and as one substance are a cause of all that is. D.W. Johnson suggests we distinguish between substantive and relative use of Trinitarian attributes in Augustine.14 Substantively, God is described by His attributes, which acquire a status of their own in the hierarchy of being, and are compared with Plato’s intelligibles. Relatively, God is described on His own terms through the persons of the Trinity, thus, exhibiting the relationship of self-expression and self-sufficiency. The author bases this distinction on Augustine’s use of “Sapientia” and “Verbum” in De Trinitate VII.2.3, when applied to Christ. “Since God is wise as God, therefore Wisdom is properly predicated of all three Persons substantively. But Verbum is not Sapiential It is attributed to the Second person relatively. It is Wisdom that is born...the divine

10 While making such a claim, we need to distinguish between the first principle of the eternal cosmos, where eternity presupposes an absence of coming into being and, respectively, of ending; and Augustine’s notion of the first principle as the Creator (see De ordine 2.5.16) who, though Himself without cause, has caused the universe into being by an act of will, intention, which was unthinkable in the metaphysics of Plotinus, for example. 11 DVR vii.13 12 DCD xi.10 13 DDC i.l 1,12 (also see DCD xi.24) 14 Johnson, D.W. “Verbum in the Early Augustine,” in Recherches Augustiniennes. Vol. VIII (1972). P. 46. 7

Word is clearly God’s self-expression”15. Later we will discuss Sapientia and Verbum used substantively and relatively in connection with the notion of truth as the measure of the existence of things created. Unlike Plotinus’s One, that does not know and cannot be an object of thought, Augustine’s Creator is the supreme Knower. In De civitate Dei he specifically emphasizes that, God made nothing unknowingly...If He made everything with knowledge, however, then, surely, what He made He knew; and from this there occurs to the mind a wondrous, but nonetheless true, thought: that this world could not be known to us if it did not exist, but it could not exist if it were not known by God16. The final point of departure with the Neoplatonic tradition lies in the fact that, unlike Plato and Plotinus, who reconciled the problem of unity of the first principle and the imperfect reality of men by placing the first above being, and creating a hierarchy of being which is a mere impression of the “really real,” Augustine does not accept the non-existence of God. In the Scripture God calls Himself “Who is,” and that entailed for Augustine the metaphysical claim that God is the supreme Being17 (being par excellence), which, in this meaning, presupposes existence: “God exists and He is the Father: God by His power; Father, by His goodness”18. In making such a statement, Augustine returns to the old paradox of being and existence. In the Platonic tradition existence was opposed to being and identified with the physical realm. Augustine’s identification of Being and existence created again the need to distinguish between the realm of intelligibles and the world of sensibles.

Being of the Creation. Truth as Measure of Existence. Substantive and Relative Use of “Truth” Augustine approaches the paradox of God’s existence by stating that, precisely because God is, the creation is as well, it derives its being from Him19. Consider the following passages. They are because they come from you. But they are not because they are not what you are. That which truly is is that which unchangeably abides 20 .

15 Johnson, D.W. op.cit. P. 46 16 DCD xi.10 17 For detailed description of Augustine’s proximity to and difference from Plotinus’s philosophy see Paul Henry’s article “Augustine and Plotinus” in Journal of Theological Studies 38 (1937). Pp. 1-23 18 Sermo 213:1 19 God is “the beginning of all existing things, originating and containing the universe” (DVR i.l); God “alone truly and supremely exists” (DVR iii.3); “There is no life which is not of God, for God is supreme life and the fount of life” (DVR xi.21); “The highest essence imparts existence to all that exists. That is why it is called essence...If it is really dead it has been reduced to nothingness. For things die only in so far as they have a decreasing part in existence” (DVR xi.22) 8

As we run over all the works as He has miraculously established, let us consider His footprints, as it were, more deeply impressed in one place and more lightly in another, but distinct even in those things which are below us. For such things could not exist in any way, or be contained in any shape, or desire or sustain any order, had they not been made by Him Who supremely is, and Who is supremely wise and supremely good21. Gilson 22 makes much of Augustine’s claim that existent things do not possess the same degree of being as God. He suggests that, according to St. Augustine only things eternal possess being, and thus matter is reduced to mere participation in eternity, which alone possesses the necessary attributes of being, i.e. unity and sameness, and is identified with the Platonic world of Intelligible Ideas. But in De libero arbitrio Augustine says:

As for temporal things, they have no existence before they exist; while they exist, they are passing away; once they have passed away, they will never exist again...How can they be thought to be permanent, when, for them, beginning to exist is the same as proceeding toward non-existence?23. This passage suggest a slightly different perspective, namely that temporal things possess being, but being of a transitory nature. They are when they are present, and they are not when they pass away. True enough, they do not possess the existence and essence of things eternal, and in that respect are inferior to them. But they do possess being and essence, precisely because they have been created by the supreme Being. In the Confessions Augustine underlines another principle according to which corporeal reality possesses its being. In book IV he writes:

So when things rise and emerge into existence, the faster they grow to be, the quicker they rush towards non-being. That is the law limiting their being. So much you have given them, namely to be parts of things which do not all have their being at the same moment, but by passing away and by successiveness, they all form the whole of which theyi are parts 24 . The whole, that Augustine talks about here, is compared with the meaning of a poem that is constructed of significant sounds, each of which passing in time reveals the totality of meaning, and does not cease to exist with the passing sounds25. From this analogy it follows that, the meaning of a poem is its true being26. In the Soliloquies Augustine makes a similar claim when he identifies the existence of a thing with its

20 Conf. vii.l 1.17 21 DCD xi.28 22 In his Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine E. Gilson points out a paradox of God’s existence in Augustine’s metaphysics of being. The paradox contains in the fact that, by reducing Being to essentia, the creation was deprived of “being” in this doctrine, and was brought to a mere participation in its true essence 23 DLA iii.7.70 24 Conf. iv.10.15 25 See DQA 32.67, 68 26 See Conf. iv.10.15, DVR xxii.42 9 capacity to resemble truth. He distinguishes between Truth and what is true, saying that although matter perishes, it is true, i.e. derives its quality and existence from Truth itself27. Thus, existent things are true to the degree that Truth itself is present in them: “Everything that exists is true, having no false imitation”28. The study of literature, for instance, is true according to the nature of the discipline, and not its subject matter. “A fable is a falsehood composed for use and pleasure;” says Augustine, “while literary study is the art which guards and controls composition...It does not originate these falsehoods, but gives us scientific knowledge about them”29. In the Confessions he gives the following account of this problem: “...you hold all things in your hand by your truth. So all things are real insofar as they have being, and the term ‘falsehood’ applies only when something is thought to have being which does not”30. Thus, truth becomes a measure of existence, be it of the eternal realm called heaven where angels abide, or of the corporeal realm of nature. However, different things possess different degrees of truth inherent in them, which degrees are measured by their capacity to resemble the supreme Truth. As Augustine himself puts it, “similitude is the mother of truth and dissimilitude the mother of falsity”31. Truth as measure of existence is used in two ways— substantively and relatively. On the one hand, truth is a measure of the human mind, according to which mens judges the fitness of created things in the realm of being, extrapolating from knowledge of the temporal world to the knowledge of eternity32. ...wisdom is nothing but the measure of the soul, that is, that through which the soul keeps its equilibrium so that it neither runs over into too much nor remains short of its fullness...when [the soul] beholds the wisdom found, and...devotes itself to it, and, without being moved by mere empty vanity, is not seduced to the treachery of images, weighed down in whose embrace it generally deserts God and finds a pernicious end, it then fears no immoderateness, and therefore no want and hence no misery...whoever is happy possesses his measure, that is, wisdom33. Thus, truth and wisdom are substantive faculties that allow human beings to exist subject to time, judging the fitness of corporeal things for the knowledge of eternity; and discerning the good for the soul, in order to enjoy the happy life to the extent possible in the fallen world.

27 Solil. ii.10.18 28 Ibid. ii.17.31 29 Ibid. ii. 11.19 30 Conf. vii.15.21 31 Solil. ii.7.13 32 On time as sign of eternity see DGadL 13.38; on temporal things made of the realm of the eternal truth, see DT ix. 12, xv.3 33 DBV 4.33. 10 On the other hand, truth is discussed relatively in Augustine, as the second person of the Trinity, co-eternal with the Father34, eternal Wisdom, which human beings strive to possess35; and the Word of God, through which the Father created all things. Augustine specifically emphasizes the second use of “truth” in De uera religione:

...truth is that which declares what is [real]...for that is the principle from which all unity derives, and to resemble which all things strive...This is truth, the Word that was in the beginning [in principio], the divine Word that was with God...Truth makes all things true which are true, and likeness makes things like which are alike. Truth is the form of all things which are true, and likeness of all things which are alike, since things are true in so far as they have being, and have being in so far as they resemble the source of all unity, that is, the form of all things that have being, which is the supreme likeness of the principle. It is also perfect truth because it is without any unlikeness36. Similitude is the term Augustine uses to refer to that quality of an existent that can be said to contain the thing’s truth according to the meaning conferred upon it by the Creator in the act of creation. Thus similitude is what determines the existence of each thing in the universe. There exists then a substantive/relative distinction between what existent things contain, namely what is true, and Truth itself. Only God, in particular Christ, the second person of the Trinity, is called the Truth, as it is through Him the creation came into existence; through His measure each thing was formed and ordered. True qualities possess being due to the existence of the Truth, while existent things are true only because of their essential similitude with respect to the Creator. The same structure applies to the distinction “Wisdom that creates” and “wisdom created,” where the first is Christ, second person of the Trinity, and the latter— “wisdom through which all things have been created, the principle in which Thou hast made heaven and earth. It is a wisdom which has been created, that is to say, an intellectual nature which is light by virtue of a contemplation of Light”37.

Similitude and Likeness as Measure of Creaturely Being According to Augustine, Christ’s created wisdom, or truth as the measure of things, dwells within the soul of man38. It is reflected in human reasoning and the ability to know truth39, which, as Augustine stresses, is a gift of God to humanity with

34 Conf. xi.7.9 35 DGadL 3.6 36 DVR xxxvi.66 37 Conf. xii.15.20 (also see Conf. xii. 17.25) 38 DLA ii.15.160 39 Conf x.6.10 11 whom He is in close fellowship as is expressed in His abiding ever-presence in the life of the creation40. Unlike Plato, for whom the corporeal reality is a mere imprint of the higher realm of being, and possesses a certain degree of existence only by means of passive participation in the world of Ideas, Augustine’s creation is an active image and likeness, or as defined earlier— similitude— of its Creator. Likeness, in Augustine, is an essential term41, though things created are never viewed by Augustine as part of the nature of God. They possess a certain likeness to the Creator, or as Augustine himself formulates it— a capacity “of being formed after Thy likeness, returning to Thee, who art one, according to its preappointed capacity, as far as it was granted to each thing after its kind”42. The formation of the creation and of a human being according to the likeness of the Trinity, at the same time, presupposes the possibility of original likeness, distorted after the fall, to be reformed in the course of history43. The creation’s capacity to receive form, and therefore to occupy a certain place in the order of being, reflects the assumption that, corporeal reality possesses being by way of resembling the truth that is itself an image of the One that supremely is. As Creator, God being self-identical and one, cannot produce something that does not possess the same qualities as Himself. Nevertheless what he creates is still distinct from Himself. The effect contains the traces of the cause, and therefore is His image44. Augustine explains this in terms of likeness positioned as a middle-term between absolute sameness and absolute otherness45, and in terms of truth as an essential condition and possibility of creaturely existence.

Image/Likeness Character of Creaturely Existence “Likeness” and “image” are distinct, though significantly connected notions in Augustine, unlike in the early patristic tradition, according to which a human being has retained his/her image after the fall, but not the likeness to the Creator46. For Augustine, “image necessarily implies the presence of some likeness to its original, whereas likeness may exist between two objects one of which is not the image of

40 DVR xlvi.86 41 DT vi.2.3; DGadL 16.57, 58 42 Conf. xii.28.38, see also Conf. xii.6.6 43 The human soul “will be re-formed by the Wisdom which is not formed but has formed all things, and will enjoy God through the spirit, which is the gift of God” (DVR xi.24) 44 DGadL 16.57 45 Gilson, Etienne. Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine. P. 212 46 See Markus, R.A. Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy. P. 361 12 another”47. In fact, in him, image is a special kind of likeness. They relate as part and whole.

...all these things also exist insofar as they exist, through the very wisdom of God. But we say that stones and animals and men and angels are like themselves...the earth is made to be earth because it has parts like one another48. Each transient thing possesses a degree of unity and self-identity, according to the form given to it by God in the act of creation. This form sustains its likeness even after the fall. Furthermore, by the very fact of existence, i.e. the ability to be formed, each thing is an image of the Creator, and as such is His true similitude.

Under Thy command, O Lord its God, it [soul] does give forth its fruit; our soul germinates works of mercy after its kind, loving its neighbour in actions of providing for fleshly needs, possessing seed in itself according to its kind; since, as a result of our infirmity, we feel compassion and are drawn to assist the needy, helping them just as we would desire to be helped, were we in like need49. If compared with the Neoplatonic notion of the One, to which no intention, original or otherwise can be ascribed, Augustine’s supreme Being who creates opens up the possibility of a fallen creation’s return to its original perfect state as intended from the beginning by its Creator. And it is precisely because of this likeness, or capacity to be formed, that the creation is able to participate in the higher reality of being.

The Goodness of the Creation as a Possibility of Return. Nature/Grace Distinction When Applied to St. Augustine’s Hierarchy of Being Unlike Plato’s fixed world of being, where the lower reality of being can never become something it is not, Augustine’s creation is a mobile world of change and becoming. While for Plato the world is an imperfect likeness of the higher intelligible form, Augustine’s notion of image and likeness reflects the initial goodness of creation as a vestige of the Creator, in that it bears all characteristics of true being, i.e. unity, form and order. While describing a human being as an image of God, Augustine makes the following analogy with the seal,

Here it is that all the rules of righteousness are inscribed and it is from here that they pass into the heart of the just man, not by bodily transfer, but as though leaving their imprint on him, just as the design of a seal is impressed in the wax without leaving the seal50.

47 Ibid. 48 DGadL 16.59 49 Conf. xiii. 17.21 50 DT xiv. 15.21. Also consider a passage from the Confessions: “Indeed all good things come from you, O God, and ‘from my God is all my salvation’. I became aware of this only later when you cried 13 The goodness of the Creator is always revealed in the creation, as He Himself is good and what He created cannot be evil. Unlike Plato’s “impressed notion,” that can be compared with the image- notion of Augustine, the latter’s notion of “impression” of the being of the Creator on the creation is a more alive image of a deeper interaction between lower and higher of being. Like in Plato, in whom higher reality cannot be consumed by the lower, Augustine however permits a more organic intertwinement between corporeal and spiritual reality. Though not essentially identical, these realities are interdependent. Although the Creator always remains self-sufficient and self-identical, He is not a neutral being of Plato, but is a caring Father who sends His only-begotten Son to redeem the fallen creation and to restore the image once distorted by sin. D.W. Johnson holds that it is precisely through the Second person of the Trinity, often referred to as proper Verbum and the Gift of God51, in Augustine, and the creation as a whole that the true involvement of God in the world is expressed52. Donald E. Daniels introduces the nature-grace distinction at this point: the grace of God is expressed through the Incarnation of Christ.

Without grace original nature would not be discovered.. .Because of the interdependence of nature and grace, creation has a multiple sense which is not at all obvious. Because of the fact of grace, e.g. the Incarnation, creation now involves re-creation. What had lapsed and collapsed from the Fall is now reformed and revived, or is capable of being so. What fell from original nature has not slipped, gone, or disintegrated forever. It is still a thing of creation. Grace restores that nature53. Daniels emphasizes Augustine’s position on the image and likeness-character of the creation. Created image and likeness have never ceased, but have been deformed as a result of sin, and need to be returned to their previous perfection.

‘For the invisible things of God from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead’ (Rom. 1:20). This is the return from temporal to eternal things, and the transformation of the old man into the new54. Perfection does not necessarily involve ascent to the higher reality of being, but an ability of things to point to the Creator, i.e. to retain their meaning in the fallen world. We will come to the theme of signification in the following Chapter.

aloud to me through the gifts which you bestow both inwardly in mind and outwardly in body (emphasis added)” (Conf. i.6.7) 51 Consider the following passage: ”He is Thy Gift...In Thy Gift we find our repose; there do we enjoy Thee” (Conf. xiii.10.11) 52 Johnson, D.W. op. cit. P. 28 53 Daniels, Donald E. “The Argument of the De Trinitate and Augustine’s Theory of Signs.” In Augustinian Studies 8 (1977). P. 48 14 Augustine’s Reconciliation of the Creator/Creation Metaphysical Difference. The Notion of Becoming Having pointed out the metaphysical connection between the Creator and the creation, we have not seen how Augustine reconciles the essential differences between the two. Being an image of the Creator, the creation must, in some way, be similar to the Creator. This similitude is expressed in the notion of “becoming,” which is used differently in Augustine than, say, in Plato. In fact, for Plato “becoming” per se is an impossible notion. A thing is either one or the other. It cannot be what it is not at the same time. Thus, the notion of becoming is used in Plato only as applied to transitory things. Augustine also uses this term to signify the transitory nature of the creation. However, for him becoming is that which exists (exist* re), i.e. has been created to the similitude of the Creator. As mentioned above, creation derives its existence from God. As an effect, it contains traces of its cause, but does not possess the same eternal immutable nature. Nonetheless, it possesses an internal drive to eternity and perfection. In Augustine’s terms, things are participating pointers, or iconic images55 of God’s ideas and through them of God Himself, meaning they occupy an active stand in the order of being.

By these things we are admonished that we must seek something unchangeable56. Therefore, although things have no eternal being, and no continuity, in comparison with the unity of the Trinity, they are always pointing to eternity, and, therefore, strive to express the internal unity without which they would not be able to exist .

Every corporeal thing is a true body but a false unity. For it is not supremely one and does not completely imitate unity. Yet, it would not be a body either if it did not have some unity. Besides, it could have no unity unless it derived it from supreme unity58. And,

In filling all things, you fill them with the whole of yourself59. Augustine is insisting on the unity and being of the creation, which implies that if the whole human being fell after the sin, there must be a possibility of complete

54 DVR lii.101 55 Marcia Colish draws a parallel between icons and verbal signs, as having a real relation to their objects, precluding identity with them. Such a nature of icons draws “the believer into a deepened and reawakened mental relationship with the spiritual realities they represent” (in The Mirror of Language. P. 4), which means that every sign possesses similar essence with the thing it points to, i.e. represents it 56 DVR xl.75; also see DVR xlii.79 57 Ibid. xxxi.58; xxxii.59-60; xliii.81; DLA ii. 16.42 58 DVR xxxiv.64 59 Conf. i.3.3 15 restoration of human being and the entire creation. In De Genesi aduersus manichaeos he says, not only the visible, but also the invisible creation can perceive time. This is made clear to us with regard to the soul. We have proof that it is subject to change in time from the great variety of its loves and from the fall by which it became wretched and from the restoration by which it returns again to happiness60. D.W. Johnson explains the internal unity and likeness of corporeal reality in terms of a “dialectical” relationship, which presupposes that “the temporal [reality] becomes a candidate for the eternal through the Incarnation” of Christ61. It is because of the supreme measure, that the creation was able to retain its image and likeness after the Fall62. Beside indicating the being-character of the creation, becoming is primarily identified in Augustine with human being as an image of God, who exists because he/she has been created, knows, i.e. possesses the power of reasoning; and loves, i.e. has a desire for God (capax Dei). It [mens anima] is...nearer to God in nature than anything else made by Him, even though it still requires to be reformed and perfected in order to be a still closer likeness. For we exist, and we know that we exist, and we take delight in our existence and our knowledge of it63. The notion of becoming when applied to a human being is always associated with the notion of transformation of human mens, and its imitation of Christ. In the Confessions Augustine says, man is ‘renewed unto the knowledge of God, according to the image of his Creator,’ and becoming (emphasis added) ‘the spiritual man judges all things and he himself is judged byl . no man 9 64 . Thus, becoming, in a strict sense, is a human being created to the image and likeness of God, retaining its image and likeness after the fall, but in need of redemption through the Word of God, and reformation of his/her life into righteous living. Because human creatures can be transformed there must be a structure of their being that enables such transformation. That structure or quality is becoming. In the Confessions Augustine identifies becoming with human capacity for God in confessing Him: It is as mystical signs that the creeping creatures and fowls that fly now strike me, but men instructed and initiated by them, and made subject to corporeal rites, would not

60 DGadM ii.6.7 61 Johnson, D.W. op cit. P. 43 62 On the role of the Incarnation see the discussion on Verbum as God’s speech on P. 79 63 DCD xi.26 64 Conf. xiii.22.32 16

make further progress, unless the soul were to live spiritually on another level and were to look forward to complete perfection after the word of admission65. The theme of becoming is discussed in great detail in Chapter Four.

Hierarchy of Being. Opposition as a Principle of Augustine’s Hierarchy of Being In a sense, Augustine appropriates a Platonic hierarchy of being into his own account of the Creator/creation distinction. He places things in the universe in a certain order in which the existence of the inferior is explained in terms of the existence of the superior reality, as in some sense means toward the highest end66. The ascent to the superior is always directed from temporal to eternal, to God; or from things to their Ideas, to God67. This hierarchical ascent is also explained, in Augustine, in terms of the fitness of things in the order of being: “The whole rhythmic succession and gradation in space and time is judged to be beautiful not by its size or length but by its ordered fitness”68. Based on the Creator/creation narrative of the Bible, Augustine divides the order into spiritual and corporeal realm, comparing the first with the intelligible realm of Ideas, and the second with the impressed notion of Plato and Plotinus. However, for Augustine the truth of things, and therefore their being, is determined upon their similitude to the Truth of the Creator. A thing can have a sensible and, thus, imperfect likeness to the Creator69. And it can have an internal likeness, expressed in its intelligible character, in its potency to be brought to unity70, or, as Augustine often says, its capacity to be formed71. Unlike Plato, however, whose Intelligible realm is called Ideas, or sometimes Ideal Forms, Augustine uses the term “realities” of things, or proper res. The shift in nomenclature is significant for Augustine. It marks an important transformation of the Platonic cosmos— a transformation motivated by and accounted for in terms of Augustine’s theory of reference, of the act of creation as God’s speech (discussed in detail in Chapters Three and Four).

Just as the opposition of contraries bestows beauty upon language, then, so is the beauty of this world enhanced by the opposition of contraries, composed, as it were, by an eloquence not of words, but of things...’’Good is set against evil, and life against

65 Conf. xiii.20.28 66 See DDC ix.26 67 See DGadL iv.32.49, and DT xiv.3.5 68 DVR xliii.80 69 DT xi.2.2-5 70 DVR xxxii.60 71 Ibid. xviii.36 17

death: so is the sinner against the godly. So look upon all the works of the Most High, and these are two and two, one against another.”72 Going back to Augustine’s hierarchy of being, it is important to note that, he builds it on the principle of opposition, and in this he sees the beauty of the creation. The oppositional character of the universe, in no way, undermines its goodness and beauty, but on the contrary serves as a proof of the harmony and unity of being present in it in principio.

Augustine’s Appropriation of the Plotinian Doctrine of the One as a Principle of the Inferential Character Inherent in Corporeal Reality In fact the very concept of the One is not, in Augustine, a Plotinian concept of indivisible, beyond being, first principle that creates being. Augustine’s One is the Universal Signified. God as one is then pointed to by the creation as sign system. In this semiological account of the Creator/creation distinction Augustine leaves behind. The Incarnation resolves the gap between the creaturely system of signs and its Universal Signified73. On the one hand, the Incarnation is the principle, a point of reference, according to which things visible, corporeal, mutable and multiple point to the invisible, spiritual, immutable and indivisible realities, and to God as the end of reference. Such an approach allows Augustine to find unity in things transient, for as long as they point to the higher reality, they are. On the other hand, Incarnation in a Neoplatonic sense means descent to lower reality. However, Augustine’s faith allows him make use of the Christian sense of Incarnation not as complete transformation into creaturely state of being, but as a medium of becoming:

But of His human nativity when He became one of us so that through the invisible made visible we might pass to the invisible from the visible74. The Incarnation of Christ demonstrates the divine intention for each thing, each human being, in particular, “of being formed after [His] likeness, returning to [Him] who art one (emphasis added), according to its preappointed capacity, as far as it was granted to each thing after its kind”75. As true image and likeness, a human being qua thing realizes the divinely preappointed capacity to point to the Creator, thus establishing and sustaining the divinely-instituted order rather than violating it.

72 DCD xi.18 73 See Daniels’ account of the Incarnation on P. 37 74 Sermo 190:2 75 Conf. xii.28.38, see also Conf. xii.6.6 18

Order and its Role in the Hierarchy of Being. Moral Order as an Underlying Principle of the Order of Being and Knowing The order of the universe and the relationship in which things and realities stand to each other reflects, in some way, the relationship of the persons of the Trinity, while remaining outside the Trinitarian order. In Augustine’s metaphysics of being and becoming order serves two purposes. In the first place, it establishes the universe as a harmony, i.e. the unity appropriate to creaturely being understood as a system of signs. In the second place, order provides a law for the human mind to judge fitness of things, and to order one’s life according to God-instituted principles76. Thus, beside its metaphysical structure, the hierarchy of being also has a religious implication in that the fitness of things, and therefore their place in the order is determined by their similitude to the Creator, i.e. their relative possession of the necessary characteristics of true being. In De civitate Dei XI Augustine distinguishes between the order of nature and rational order. In the order of nature he distinguishes the following gradation of existent things: life— sensation—intelligence— immortality. Thus, a living, sentient, intelligent, and immortal creature is higher in the hierarchy of being. But, as Augustine notes, “there are also various standards of value arising out of the use to which we put this thing or that”77. The value of things is judged according to the preappointed capacity of mens to judge the fitness of things in the rational order, or the order of knowing. As Augustine notes further,

reason considers what value a thing has in itself, as part of the order of nature, whereas necessity considers how to obtain what will meet its need78. What Augustine means is, that although according to the order of nature things can be placed in a certain hierarchy, their value is determined not upon their measure of utility in the order of being, but upon their necessity in the moral order. Thus, says Augustine,

even though angels rank above men in the natural order, good men are nonetheless placed above the wicked angels according to the law of righteousness79. Therefore, moral order underlines the ontological order of nature and knowing, and it is due to this order that all things created by God are good and strive to perfection.

76 See De musica vi. 14.46 on love ordering lower things in the life of a human being, and suffering no disorder from them 77 DCD xi.16 78 Ibid. xi.16 79 DCD xi.16. In DCD xi.25 while describing natural, rational, and moral philosophy, Augustine notes, “N o one doubts that nature has some cause, science some method, and life some purpose” 19

God, therefore, supreme and true, by an inviolable and unchanging law by which H e rules all creation, subjects the body to the soul, the soul to Himself, and so everything to Himself. In no act does God abandon the soul either for punishment or reward. For, H e has judged it to be the most beautiful, so that it is the exemplar of all reality, and all reality is so arranged in a hierarchy that anyone who considers the totality of things may not be offended by the lack of conformity in any part, and that every punishment and every reward of the soul should contribute something corresponding to the measured beauty and arrangement of all things.80 It is precisely this order that Augustine is mostly concerned with when he talks about sin and the fall, and the subsequent redemption through Jesus Christ. The moral order, thus, is a foundation, an underlining principle of the order of nature.

Reference as a Principle of Order. Things as Signa of Higher Reality No matter how fixed Augustine’s order of being seems to be, each thing enjoys a certain relative autonomy and equality. Lower realities, though inferior to the higher ones, “are suitable to other living things.. .rejoicing in some law of equality.”81 It has been pointed out previously that, corporeal things are images, pointers to higher realities, and, as such, can be called signa of the realities identified with proper res, possessing spiritual nature, or proper being (see below the discussion on Augustine’s theory of signification). But signa possess a being of their own, and are real82, as long as they contain the truth of the realities they point to. Corporeal reality then is viewed as an image of the higher reality of being in the order of nature. It thereby becomes a sign, an object of thought in, what becomes, a rational order with intelligible relations at its basis. As an object of thought, a sign becomes a means to the knowledge of the world and, more importantly, of God, which, in Augustine, means His enjoyment and possession to some extent . As pointed out above, in the order of nature things and realities are stages of gradual ascent from inferior to superior, temporal to eternal, having God as their end; in the order of knowledge they are signs of higher realities— intelligible structures contemplated by the mind, the only true image of God. In this respect we can distinguish between (1) order of nature, (2) rational order, and (3) moral order, which altogether form a totality, combining the characteristics of true being, namely—being, knowledge, and love84.

80 DQA 36.80 81 De musica vi. 13.38 82 In DDC i.4 Augustine says, “Every sign is also a thing, since what is not a thing does not exist”, meaning that every sign is a thing in the hierarchy of being and knowing 83 See the discussion on use/enjoyment on P. 45 84 See Augustine’s treatment of the issue in DCD xi.28 20 Rational Order as Order of Knowing The three orders can be fully embraced only by the mind of a human being, which is ordered, accordingly, by Truth Himself as can be seen by juxtaposing the following two passages.

A human being is a major kind of thing, being made ‘in the image and likeness of God’ [Gen. 1:26-7] not by virtue of having a mortal body but by virtue of having a rational soul and thus a higher status than animals85. And,

The individual man, who is called the image of God not in respect of all that belongs to his nature but in respect of his mind alone, is a personal unity, having the image of the Trinity in his mind86. Unlike the creation that has been made by the Trinity and retains traces of its Creator, the first human being has been created according to the image and likeness of the Creator, thus being superior in the rational and moral orders. The creation at large possesses certain attributes of being. It resembles the unity of the eternal realm of being, and is thus an object of thought in its capacity as sign of “realities,” or proper res. By contrast, a human being is not a mere object of thought, but himself possesses the contemplative faculty of reasoning, where reason must be understood broadly, as a power to judge the fitness of things in the universe, and to know itself and its on Creator . The process of knowing, as we will see later, involves not just the achievement of the knowledge of things, of oneself, and God, but also accounts for and so enables the life of virtue. Reason, and reasoning per se, is not an end in itself, in Augustine, but is subjected to the life of virtue of a human being88.

1.3. Being Creature or Becoming (exist0 re) in the Order of Knowing According to St. Augustine

Human Being as an Image of God and a Rational Soul. Human Being Created to the Image of the Trinity In De genesi ad litteram 16 and in the Confessions XIII Augustine discusses in detail the special kind of status a human being occupies, being created to the image and likeness of the Creator. In De genesi ad litteram 16.56 Augustine emphasizes that, while making the universe God said, “Let there be made,” whereas while creating a human being the expression “Let us make” was used, conveying the

85 DDC i.39-40 86 0 7 xv. 12.7 87 See DCD xi.26 on human being as an image of God possessing being, knowledge and love 88 See Ibid. xi.16 on moral order as an underlying principle of order of nature and of reason; and DO ii.9.26 on virtue as the end of human being 21 excellence of a human nature, and as Augustine argues, his likeness to the Trinity Itself. However, first he suggests that a human being was made according to the second person of the Trinity. Later in De genesi ad litteram he becomes dissatisfied with the ambiguity of the term “image” in man, and says that man cannot be an image of either person of the Trinity, but he/she is an image of the Trinity as unity: “man was not made to the image of the Father alone, or of the Son alone, or of the Holy Spirit alone, but to the image of the Trinity”89. He repeats this claim in his later work De Trinitate, which is specifically dedicated to the theme of a human being as an image of the Trinity.

Mens as Image of God Proper Augustine distinguishes two faculties of a human being: his physical body that is subject to corruption and death, and mens— an undifferentiated notion of soul, or spiritus, and mind, or ratio90, due to which a human being is called imago Dei proper: “The individual man, who is called the image of God not in respect of all that belongs to his nature but in respect of his mind alone, is a personal unity, having the image of the Trinity in his mind”91. Thus, it is due to mens that a human being is called an image of God, and it is mens that would become Augustine’s favourite theme in the framework of his philosophy of becoming. In De Trinitate he summarizes his concept of mens as an image of God in the following way:

Although the human mind is not of that nature which belongs to God, yet the image of that nature which transcends every other in excellence is to be sought and found in the element which in our own nature is the most excellent...It is in virtue of the fact that it has a capacity for God and the ability to participate in God, that it is his image...Here then is the mind, remembering itself, understanding itself, loving itself. Perceiving this we perceive a trinity— a trinity still less than God, but already an image of God92. Human mens is the highest faculty of human being in all three orders: the natural, rational and moral orders. It exists, it is intelligent and it has an ability of discernment. Beside the natural capacity to be, to know and to love, it possesses an element of self- reflection and need for perfection that resembles the relationship between the persons of the divine Trinity. The internal drive to knowledge and, in particular, to self- knowledge reflects the presence of its origin in the human being, to whose image he/she has been created, and whom he/she strives to grasp through understanding.

89 DGadL 16.61 90 In DLA i.9.65 Augustine says, “Since the superiority plainly lay in the spirit, we knew nothing else to call it except reason {ratio). Then we recalled that reason can be called mind or spirit (spiritus)’' 91 DT xv .12.1 22 Trinitarian Images in Mens Thus, Augustine turns our attention to the human soul (mens) which reflects the divine Trinity in its capacity to be, to know, to love—one of the three Trinitarian images in human being, i.e. Memoria, intelligentia, amor (memory, self-knowledge, love)93; Mens, notia, amor (mind, love and knowledge)94; and Memoria sui, intelligentia, voluntas (memory, understanding, will)95. All three images play a very important role in the capacity of a human being to participate in God. It is beyond the scope of this work to give a detailed outline of Augustine’s human epistemology in the context of his Trinitarian philosophy. However, it is important to touch upon several concepts that play an important role in the theme of becoming.

Knowledge of God in the Prelapsarian Condition of Mens Created to the image and likeness of the Trinity, a human being possessed unmediated knowledge of God in the prelapsarian world, where knowledge must be understood in terms of direct communication with God, or rather a contemplative vision of God. In this state of affairs the human being was a keeper of the order instituted by God, and thus was a highly ordered creature, meaning he/she could see the Truth above his/her mind and understand it in the soul, which Augustine calls the “inner man.” In De Magistro Augustine expresses this view in terms of a human capacity to love the Truth—the notion being closely connected with the notion of unmediated knowledge and vision of God:

That soul keeps order that, with its whole self, loves Him above itself, that is, God and fellow souls as itself. In virtue of this love it orders lower things and suffers no disorder 96 from them .

Mediation of Truth Through Senses and Signs of Corporeal Reality After the fall, however, truth is hidden in a human being97; he/she is separated from the truth by a lie in his/her orientation toward him/herself98, which means toward multiplicity of this world, while truth by nature presupposes unity of being.

When man fell away from the unity of God the multitude of temporal forms was disturbed among his carnal senses, and his sensibilities were multiplied by the changeful

92Drxii.ll.8 93 Ibid. xiv.8.11-12 94 Ibid. ix.2.2-5.8, ix.4.4; DCD xi.26 95 Ibid. x .ll.17-12.19; xv.3.5 96 De musica vi. 14.46 97 In the Confessions Augustine gives a lot of attention to the issue of impossibility of certainty and direct knowledge of truth in the postlapsarian condition of a human being (see Conf. xii.25.35; DT xii.14.23; DLA ii.12.132, ii.14.152; DFR 1.2) 98 DGadM ii.16.24, 27.41 23

variety...As it is, the corruption of the body burdens the soul, and its earthly habitation forces it to think of many things; for the humble beauty of material objects is hurried along in the order in which one thing succeeds another". And unlike before, truth needs to be discovered within a human soul100, or to be more precise, within the mens of man, which, for Augustine, is the only true image and likeness of God, and as such cannot be destroyed by sin, only distorted and deformed. However, in postlapsarian world knowledge necessarily needs mediation through the body and physical signs of the corporeal world: “The reason for all these words being expressed corporeally is the abyss of this world and the blindness of the flesh, as a result of which the objects of thought cannot be seen; hence, the need to make sounds which assail the ears”101.

Augustine’s Negative Epistemology. The Fall of Complete Human Being by Will. Return to God Through Wilful Redirection of Mens. Definition of a Happy Life Augustine develops a negative epistemology based on the assumption that direct, unmediated, certain knowledge of God is impossible after the Fall. He, nevertheless, allows for the possibility of knowledge. However, it is limited to mere awareness of the prior possession of unmediated knowledge, but not what that knowledge is . Plotinus had solved the problem of the impossibility of possessing the certitude of knowledge by creating an even deeper gap between physical and spiritual realms of being. He claimed that the soul resides in the realm of pure Ideas, being illumined by them directly without awareness of the body, thus, placing the soul beyond change and the corruption of the body. Augustine, however, follows the Scripture in positing that Adam, the first man, has violated God’s order, i.e. the dependence of the less perfect upon perfection itself.103 As Kevin Hart puts it,

from an undifferentiated knowledge of good to a differentiated and fatal knowledge of good and evil. From God’s presence we pass to His absence; from immediacy to mediation;...from fullness of being to a lack of being;...from purity to impurity; and from life to death104. To turn away one’s will from God, or in Augustine’s own terms, to engage in misuse105 corrupts the soul, and together with it the body and the mind of man, thus,

99 DVR xxi.41 100 See the discussion on recollection on P. 37 101 Conf. xiii.23.34, also see DGadM ii.20.30 102 See De Magistro xi.36 103 DVR ii. 16.24; see also DLA i.16.116 104 Hart, Kevin. The Trespass of the Sign. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. P. 5 105 DGadL 1.3 24 placing it in a lower place in the order of being106. As Augustine says in De libero arbitrio, “the movement of a stone is natural, while that of a spirit is voluntary”107, meaning that a higher form of life possesses will by which it can either cling to God’s truth and eternity or to things created which are lower in the hierarchy of being, and therefore inferior108. As the fall happened through the act of will, return is possible through the same channel109. Will is a part of mens, and therefore the redemption of the whole human being is possible through the redemption of the mind. Redemption occurs via the redirection of the will to God. Redirection of the will happens through the assent of the mind to the truth revealed by Christ110, the redeemer, the Word of God, “Wisdom creating,” which as the supreme measure of the soul directs it to the “wisdom created.”111 The latter is viewed, in Augustine, as the fullness and measure of the soul’s happy life; the plenitude of knowledge resulting in the fullness of human understanding112. Augustine summarizes this view in De beata vita, where he says that the soul’s only true desire is “to recognize piously and completely the One through whom [it is] led into the truth, the nature of the truth [it] enjoy[s], and the bond that connects [it] with the supreme measure”113.

Knowing as a Mode of Creaturely Being. Epistemic Acts as Creative Acts of Humans For we understand only in part until that which is perfect comes to us. To make us worthy of this perfect gift, He, equal to the Father in the form of God, became like to us in the form of a servant, and refashions us into the likeness of God. The only Son of God, having become the Son of Man, makes many sons of men the sons of God [similitude, Y.F.]; and on these men [multitude, Y.F.], reared as servants, with the visible form of servants, He bestows the freedom of beholding the form of God...But He and the Father are one, and the person who sees Him sees the Father also, therefore, ‘the lord of hosts, he is the King of Glory.’ Turning to us, He will show us His face and ‘we shall be saved;’ we shall be satisfied and He will be sufficient for us114.

106 Consider the passage from the Confessions: “The body inclines by its weight toward its own place. A weight is not necessarily an inclination toward the lowest level, but to its proper place” (Conf. xiii.9.10) 107 DLA iii.1.10 108 Ibid. iii.7.72 109 Marcia Colish uses the imagery of channels through which the communication and becoming is possible (see The Mirror of Language, P. 24) 110 Conf. vi.4.6 1,1 DVR xxxiii.62; DGadM ii.23.35 112 See DBV 4.31,32 113 DBV 4.35 114 Sermo 194:3; also see DVR liii.103 25 Augustine makes a fundamental claim, when he says that, it is through intellectual formation that a human being as a totality acquires ontological formation. In other words, it is those epistemic acts ordered to the life of virtue that transform human becoming so that, he/she moves either toward or away from that mode of creaturely perfection that Augustine calls an express likeness. Knowing becomes for Augustine a mode of creaturely being. The process of coming to know necessarily and primarily involves the transformation of a human being. In its turn the transformative process illustrates the operative pattern of Grace in human life through the figure of Christ, who dwells within a human mind and forms it, illumines it, so that it can perceive the truth, or be capable of interpreting things as signs of a higher reality115. As the quote suggests, the goal of such an exercise is the soul’s transformation into a similitude of the divinity.

Knowledge in an Enigma—the Postlapsarian Condition of Mens. Types of Knowledge: Scientia—Knowledge of Things Created; Sapientia— Redeemed Knowledge of God as Beatific Vision In his De Trinitate, Augustine says that, a human being sees through a mirror in an enigma, where “mirror” signifies the image, and “enigma”— obscure similitude, or likeness to the Creator.116 This metaphor emphasizes the broken character of human knowledge and the mens ’ need of restoration to the fullness of vision and contemplation of the Truth of God. The knowledge that a human mind possesses in the postlapsarian world is necessarily mediated through the body. Augustine distinguishes between knowledge as scientia and sapiential1 Scientia presupposes the knowledge of things created, which are interpreted by the mind as signs, pointers to God, and therefore, can be used in the acquisition of the knowledge of their Creator118. Sapientia or the redeemed knowledge of God119 entails an ability of direct vision of God, which comes with direct contemplation of the eternity, the only knowledge man strives to possess in the course of his life, and the only type of knowledge that can make him/her happy. The first type of knowledge is natural. It is, as Augustine says in De Trinitate XV. 17.10, the active power of the mind to cogitate, i.e., to bring together things of

115 Drix.12; Conf. xii.15, 16 116 Ibid. xv. 16.9 117 Conf. xv.5.3 118 Ibid. x.6.8 119 Ibid. x.xliii.70 26 this world into the state of being knowables120. The process of cogitation is laid out by Augustine in the Confessions X:

Once again they have to be brought together [cogenda] so as to be capable of being known; that means they have to be gathered [colligenda] from their dispersed state. Hence is derived the word cogitate...Nevertheless the mind claims the verb cogitate for its own province. It is what is collected (that is, by force) in the mind, not elsewhere, which is strictly speaking the object of recollection121. The importance of the phrase “object of recollection” is crucial for his epistemology. As already mentioned briefly, knowledge proper is possible only by way of reasoning and “reflection within the soul,”122 or strictly speaking, it is possible only through

i 'yo mens . Both scientia and sapientia are products of the undifferentiated mind/soul faculty of a human being. Like Plotinus then, Augustine attributes the knowledge of sensibles to soul alone. As he states in De ordine:

to perceive by the senses is one thing, but to know is something else. Wherefore, if we know any thing,...it is contained in the intellect alone, and by it alone can it be grasped124. He argues his position under the assumption that the soul is the life of the body, and that as imago Dei the soul is vivified by God, Who alone is the life of the soul125.

Sense-Perception In his theory of sense-perception Augustine argues that soul uses the body. In other words, the senses of the body direct the soul’s attention to knowables, and in return it (the soul) applies itself to a specific sense, and through it discerns the good for the nature of its body126.

Now it is necessary that we be admonished about the truth through these eyes and these ears, and it is difficult to resist the phantasms which enter the soul through these senses, although truth’s admonition also enters through them127 Augustine stresses the epistemological necessity for sense-perception which after the Fall creates the possibility of erroneous knowledge. At the same time it opens the door for truth to enter the mind of a human being, which he sees as an operative pattern of grace. Thus, while emphasizing the necessity to overcome the senses and

lzu See DO ii.2.4-5 121 Conf. x.11.18 122 DLA ii.3.30 123 DO ii. 18.48 124 Ibid. ii.2.6; on knowledge belonging to the soul alone see DLA ii.3.29; DT xv.21.12, DVR xii.25, etc. 125 DLA ii. 16.161 126 See Solil. i.4.9; DQA 33.72; Conf xi.4.6 127 DGadM ii.20.30 27 sense-knowledge, Augustine, nevertheless, connects sense-perception with the epistemic act of knowing the truth. Augustine distinguishes between exterior and interior objects of perception, where the former are associated with physical objects or events present to senses, and the latter— with interior objects, remote from the senses of the body, like things of the past; things that stand in immediate presence to the mind, like intellectual skills; and “indefinable notions or recorded impressions, as in the case of the mind’s emotions, which the memory retains even when the mind is not experiencing them.”128 All of these are stored in memory in a form of mental images. To make a distinction between sense-perception through bodily, or direct experience of a human being, and knowledge derived from the images stored in memory, Augustine introduces a notion of sententia, or internal sense, according to which things remote from the senses are present to the internal perception of the mind129. Whether interior or exterior, all objects of perception need to be internalized by the mind, in order to acquire intelligible character. Following the Neoplatonic tradition where, the farther an object is from its essence, the less knowable it becomes, and therefore, the less degree of being it possesses; Augustine introduces the degree of perception and intelligibility in the objects of thought. He distinguishes between phantasiai and phantasms, where the first are images stored in the memory of directly experienced passions of the body, or the images of proper sense-perception. In the framework of this distinction, phantasms are thus images of things never experienced, but rather constructed by the mind based on previous experiences, and as such images of images of experienced realities130. In De Genesi aduersus manichaeos Augustine emphasizes that phantasms are images that do not represent things as they are, but are rather what imagination depicts131. Consequently, as the farthest removed from direct perception, phantasms are subject to erroneous knowledge of the mind, and are often called opinions. Logically, one must conclude that phantasms are not to be included in the picture at all, or to be placed on the lowest in the order of knowing, as it was in Plato’s metaphysics, where the painting of a thing, which itself was only a representation of

128 Conf. x.17.26 129 See DCD xi.3; for detailed analysis of the notion of internal sense see GJ.P. O’Daly’s article “Sensus interior in St. Augustine, De libero arbitrio 2.3.25-6.51” in Studia Patristica 16.2 (1985). Pp. 528-532 130 See De musica vi. 11.32 131 DGadM ii.27.41, Solil. ii.20.34; also see Conf. iii.6.10 2 8 the Idea of the thing, was to be dismissed as distorted representation of a real thing, thus possessing no likeness to the Ideal. But Augustine differs in this respect.

Incongruity Between Augustine’s and Neoplatonic Theories of Representation Here I would like to state briefly the significance of Augustine’s break away with the Neoplatonic tradition. As has been argued, it is his Christian background that influenced Augustine’s theory of representation. Augustine believes the Scripture to be a true story of the Creator/creation relationship. However, none of us has ever experienced the events described in the Bible. They are removed from us not just in time, but also by reason of the very impossibility of conceiving a la Genesis the creation in its primary perfect state. That is, the human mind is a part of the fallen world, and as such cannot judge the unfallen. But we nonetheless must believe this story, and understand its ontological and epistemic implications. Now the very idea that a book or a narrative should be granted such epistemic authority is ridiculous to anyone working with a consistently Platonic doctrine of Being and if viewed in the Neoplatonic hierarchy of being and Plato’s theory of representation. How can Augustine who appropriates the Platonic account of the gradation of being and intelligibility of things, explain the authority of the Scripture? It becomes possible due to Augustine’s notion of similitude and speech. The Scripture is first of all a similitude of the Verbum, i.e. God’s creative speech132, and only secondly is it a result of human pen. In the Confessions Augustine argues:

Even heaven and earth will pass away, but Thy words shall not pass away. For, the skin shall be folded up, and the ‘grass’, over which it was spread, shall pass away with its beauty, but Thy word abides forever133. The fundamental difference, however, that separates Augustine’s from Plato’s theory of representation is the notion of truth. For Plato truth is an intelligible category, perceived by the intellect alone and conceived by it as the highest degree of intellectual abstraction, expressed in logical and mathematical categories of unity and oneness of being, and which belongs to the world of Ideas alone. Augustine’s notion of truth assumes the figure of Christ, the second person of the Trinity, the Word of God and His supreme Wisdom, where wisdom is a moral category. While in Plato a human being can ascend to the truth by way of proper instruction and reflection of the mind; Augustine’s way of knowing involves the whole of a human being; epistemic

132 See the discussion on Christ as creative power of God in Chapter Four 133 Conf. xiii. 15.18 29 transformation necessarily involves ontological transformation expressed in a complete change in one’s way of thinking and living. In Augustine’s terms a human being does not necessarily ascend intellectually to the truth above, but reaches it by virtue of assent initiated by the will of a human being, i.e., by the human desire to know and love the truth. Describing his state of mind as a young fellow who struggled with the question of truth, he says: Fearing a precipitate plunge, I kept my heart from giving any assent, and in that same state of suspended judgment I was suffering a worse death. I wanted to be certain about things I could not see as I am certain that seven and three are ten134. In his works he often uses the word “heart,” not mind when talking of knowledge of eternal truth, to emphasize the spiritual character of knowing.

Self-Knowledge as Means to the Knowledge of God In the postlapsarian condition, the human mens is removed from the truth by the habit of bodily passions and desires which blind the soul. In order to return to its original state of contemplating the truth, it needs guidance, which is provided by Christ, the Inner Teacher. Augustine argues that truth can be known by mens through the Word, the second person of the Trinity, and through the word of God laid out for humans in the book of the Bible, but because of its blindness the soul cannot attain to the certitude of knowledge. So as I make my confession, they wish to learn about my inner self, where they cannot penetrate with eye or ear or mind. Yet although they wish to do that and are ready to believe me, they cannot really have certain knowledge. The love which makes them good people tells them that I am not lying in confessing about myself, and the love in them believes me 133 Augustine compensates for the impossibility of possessing the knowledge of things eternal and of God as the Creator of this world, with the notion of faith, which in him becomes a mode of knowing, a condition and possibility for truth to be revealed to human understanding 136 . He emphasizes the faith-character of all knowing in the postlapsarian world in De uera religione: The trustworthiness of temporal things whether past or future can be believed rather than known by the intelligence...In the human race a multitude has no power unless by consent, i.e. agreement in unity 137 .

134 Ibid. vi.4.6 135 Ibid. x.3.4. See DFR 1.2 136 See DUC 34. For detailed study of the notion of “faith seeking understanding” see Donald. E. Daniels, op. cit. 137 DVR xxv.46 30 Paradoxically, he also argues the very impossibility of knowing the truth by way of intellect due to the latter’s mutable nature:

In the inward man dwells truth. If you find that you are by nature mutable, transcend yourself. But remember in doing so that you must also transcend yourself even as a reasoning soul...And yet truth is not reached by reasoning, but is itself the goal of all who reason138. In this is expressed one of the paradoxes of Augustine. He raises the same problem in the Confessions when he deals with memory as storehouse of mental images of things experienced and perceived by the mind. The question he states is, where God can be found. While searching for God in memory (which he calls a “storehouse” when talking of the impressions of sensed objects put on reserve in memory, or in another place— a “treasure-house,”139 when describing memory as self-awareness where we recall ourselves and our past deeds and thoughts), he realized at some point that God does not dwell in memory, and that’s where the paradox begins. If a human being cannot be mindful of God, how does he come to know God?140 In book XI of the Confessions he comes to the conclusion that we can never transcend memory and mind, unless they are purified by Christ, as these are the only faculties that allow us to cogitate— bring together our experience into an intellectual unity and knowledge proper. Having realized the partiality of all knowledge, and thus the impossibility of full knowledge in the present condition, he nonetheless does not reject the role of memory and thinking per se. In fact, he emphasizes their significant role as the source of human intention, and power to bring human life in order. Augustine concludes that memory is needed for ordering things transitory and fugitive. It is an agent that preserves and presents human experience as always present to mind to cogitate upon 141 .

Sententia—Internal Sense and Self-Recollection In De libero arbitrio Augustine says,

by means of the inner sense, corporeal objects are perceived through the sense of the body, and the senses of the body themselves are also perceived by the inner sense; but by means of reason, all these things, and reason itself (emphasis added), become known and are included in knowledge142.

138 Ibid. xxix.72 139 Conf. x.7.11,8.14. 140 Ibid. x. 17.26 141 Ibid. x.10.17. See also DO ii.2.6 142 DLA ii.4.38 31 “Reason itself’ is the mind of a human being that is capable of knowing itself along with the objects perceived through the senses. The possibility of self-knowledge is developed by him through his numerous dialogues, and is expressed in De civitate Dei in one argument:

It is...without any delusive representation of images or phantasms that I am wholly certain that I exist, and that I know this fact and love it.. .For if I am mistaken, I exist. He who does not exist clearly cannot be mistaken; and so, if I am mistaken, then, by the same token, I exist...Since, therefore, I would have to exist even if I am mistaken, it is beyond doubt that I am not mistaken in knowing that I exist.. .And when I love these two things, I add my love to them as a third thing, no smaller in esteem than the things that I know 143. He applies the same argument to memory that, alongside experiences and learned things, remembers itself and the very act of forgetfulness144, which gives Augustine enough reason to accept the possibility of self-knowledge. As a human being is an image of God, and thus His similitude, self-knowledge by mens becomes an important part of the knowledge of God and of the invisible spiritual reality. As Augustine says in De ordine:

The chief cause of this error is that man does not know himself. Now, for acquiring this self-knowledge, he needs a constant habit of withdrawing from things of the senses and of concentrating his thought within himself, and holding it there145. In virtue of the fact that the mind of a human being is capable of creating unity of being by organizing his/her thoughts into a narrative provided by the interpretation of one’s self, it is capable of withdrawing from external order, thus creating internal intelligible order, which is a condition and possibility for the very knowledge of God, and, consequently, of His possession to some extent146. In De ordine, Augustine expresses the problem of external and internal order in his sphere analogy,

if you wish to pass from the centre to any part of the circle, the whole is lost sight of in proportion as many parts are traversed. In like manner, the soul spreading out from itself is battered by a kind of immensity and worn out in the quality of a beggar, because its nature forces it to seek everywhere that which is one, and the multitude does not permit it to find unity147. The quoted passage is a perfect justification of Augustine’s theme of self-knowledge as means toward God. According to him, the soul possesses unity of being in virtue of its image and likeness character. Naturally, self-knowledge becomes a source of return to that state of perfection that it possessed before the fall, namely direct

143 DCD xi.26 144 Conf. xi.16.24 145 DO i. 1.3 146 See Solil. i.1.3 147 DO i. 1.4 32 unmediated knowledge of God, and contemplation of eternal wisdom. Augustine’s poetic description of the vision at Ostia before Monica’s death can serve as an example of the condition of the mind a human being seeks to possess, which he calls a beatific vision: We would hear his word, not through the tongue of the flesh, nor through the voice of an angel, nor through the sound of thunder, nor through the obscurity of a symbolic utterance. Him who in these things we love we would hear in person without their mediation. That is how it was when at that moment we extended our reach and in a flesh of mental energy attained the eternal wisdom which abides beyond all things. If only it could last, the other visions of a vastly interior kind could be withdrawn! Then this alone could ravish and absorb and enfold in inward joys the person granted the vision. So too eternal life of the quality of that moment of understanding after which we sighed. Is not this the meaning of ‘Enter into the joy of your Lord’?148 The ability of the mind to create a meaningful pattern, or if you prefer, an internal intelligible order, and hold things in the mind in simultaneity as ready to hand, serves also as a possibility of true interpretation of one’s life in a broader context of the Creator/creation relationship, where the latter is as a vestige of the former149. This ability is viewed in Augustine as a condition and possibility for the knowledge of God.

Truth as the Key Concept in Augustine’s Epistemology of Becoming. Ascent or Assent?—Augustine’s Doctrine of Return Going back to the notion of truth as an object of knowledge, it is obvious from the previous discussion that it cannot be known in the present condition of mens, thus it cannot be an object of thought. This is another point of departure from the Neoplatonic tradition, where intellectual knowledge of truth was viewed as the only way of ascent to the realm of intelligible , and the only condition of return (Plotinus). Augustine does not see truth as an object of thought any more, but as a goal of human return to the original state of creaturely perfection expressed in his journey-language, and/or the biblical theme of Prodigal son. The theme of exile goes back to Plato, who first presents it in his Statesman as the “abyss of unlikeness”150. Augustine develops this theme in the Confessions where he makes a fundamental epistemological claim: By the Platonic books I was admonished to return into myself. With you as my guide I entered into my innermost citadel, and was given power to do so because you had

148 Conf. ix. 10.25 149 See Ralph Flores’s account of the narrative as a key notion in Augustine’s philosophy in his article “Reading and Speech in St. Augustine’s Confessions.” In Augustinian Studies 6 (1975). Pp. 1-13 150 quoted in Margaret W. Ferguson. “Saint Augustine’s Region of Unlikeness: The Crossing of Exile and Language” in The Georgia Review. No. 29,1975. P. 845 33

become my helper. I entered and with my soul’s eye, such as it was, saw above that same eye of my soul the immutable light higher than my mind.. .It transcended my mind, not in the way that oil floats on water, nor as heaven is above earth. It was superior because it made me. When I first came to know you, you raised me up to make me see that what I saw is Being, and that I who saw am not yet Being...And I found myself far from you in the region of dissimilarity...And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me (emphasis added)151. And,

I would have no being, I would not have any existence, unless you were in me. Or rather, I would have no being if I were not in you ‘of whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things’152. To start with the first quote, Augustine confesses that it is due to the Neoplatonic books that he was turned inside to search for truth within his soul, according to the method developed by Plotinus, i.e. self-examination through the eye of the mind perceived as internal vision capable of knowing the truth. But as he proceeded with self-search he realized that the truth, he has been searching inside, could not be found anywhere, but was above, i.e. superior to mens. On the other hand, the very eye of mens, with which he sought truth, possesses by nature the capacity for supreme Being. Nevertheless, the capacity to receive light, i.e. truth is not achieved by the mind, but is granted by the supreme Light, who abides forever.

The Notion of Truth as Second Person of the Trinity Augustine makes a significant shift from the language of ascent to the theme of Incarnation, which fundamentally changes his view on human epistemology. Accordingly, a human being will not transcend into the Godhead by ascent to the higher reality, but the Creator in the person of Christ, will “take possession of the heart in a spiritual sense.. .He dwells within us so that we may be interiorly converted, so that we may be quickened by Him and formed after His pattern”153. The Incarnation of Christ is treated in terms of God’s presence to the creation. Truth is not simply above the mind of a human being, and metaphysically beyond the physical realm154. Its presence is mediated through the figure of Christ— the only mediator between humans and God—who is in a miraculous spiritual connection with the mind of a human being. Mens on its own does not have enough strength and knowledge to

151 Conf. vii. 10.16 152 Ibid. i.2.2 153 Sermo 264:4 154 See above the discussion on nature-grace distinction introduced by D.E. Daniels in the context of Creator/creation relationship 34 return to God, thus it needs guidance expressed in a notion of grace and illumination in Augustine.

The Word himself cries to you [soul] to return. There is a place of undisturbed quietness (emphasis added) where love is not deserted if it does not itself depart. See how these things pass away to give place to others, and how the universe in this lower order is constituted out of all its parts. “Surely I shall never go anywhere else,” says the word of God. Fix your dwelling there. Put in trust there whatever you have from him, my soul, at least not that you are wearied of deception. Entrust to the truth whatever has come to you from the truth155. First of all, note the contrast between the “region of dissimilarity” as a condition of present human existence, and “place of undisturbed quietness” as a state of mind that Christ provides those who open the door to Him. The importance of the figure of Christ as the point of return is grounded in His fixed, or so-called, real nature. He is the only point of concentration that is available to a human being. Even the human mens, as stated above, is subject to change. Later we will discuss the Sign-character of Christ as Verbum of God as a sign of His presence to the creation (see Chapter Two).

Augustine’s Doctrine of Revelation and Illumination. Proximity and Difference with the Neoplatonic Theory of Illumination To understand the size of the gap between the Neoplatonic concept of ascent to the higher intelligible realm of being as the way of contemplation of truth above, and Augustine’s vision of truth as revealed to human understanding by Christ through mens— the inner man, it is important to emphasize clearly Augustine’s position regarding the given character of all knowledge.

‘Grant me Lord to know and understand’ which comes first— to call upon you or to praise you, and whether knowing you precedes calling upon you. But who calls upon you when he does not know you? For an ignorant person might call upon someone else instead of the right one. But surely you may be called upon in prayer that you may be known. Yet, ‘how shall they call upon him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe without a preacher?’ ‘They will praise the Lord who seek for him’. In seeking him they find him, and in finding they will praise him. Lord, I would seek you, calling upon you— and calling upon you is an act of believing in you (emphasis added). You have been preached to us. My faith, Lord, calls upon you. It is your gift to me. You breathed it into me by the humanity of your Son, by the ministry of your preacher156. In this quote from the opening prayer of the Confessions, Augustine emphasizes a fundamental epistemological problem, which he attempts to resolve in his philosophy of becoming, i.e. one can know only what is revealed by God. The human being is a creature of God; and the human mens is of a lower order than eternal truth. Moreover, humans have lost the ability to know the truth in direct vision, or face to face; thus

155 Conf. iv. 11.16; also see Conf. xi.8.10, Solil. i.1.3 35 humans abide in the ignorance and blindness of sensible objects. Taking into account all these factors, it is only by the miraculous grace of God that humans can have any knowledge of the Creator of the universe. Even the desire to know God is God’s gift to humanity. Thus, a human being does not ascend to the truth, but gives his assent, or explicit desire to know and love the truth revealed by supreme Wisdom. In Augustine, instead of ascent the soul’s assent presupposes the descent of God, i.e. Incarnation of Christ157. Christ is Truth Himself. Thus, by descending to the lower realm of being, truth is being exposed, i.e., externalized for human “digestion.” Consider the passages from the Sermons, where Augustine alludes to truth as nourishment of the creatures:

He is the fullness of our manger because ‘the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us’. So that man might eat the Bread of angels, the Creator of the angels became man. The angels praise Him by living; we, by believing; they by enjoying, we by seeking; they by obtaining, we by striving to obtain (emphasis added); they by entering, we by knocking158. The assent to the truth, thus, is expressed in the notion of faith as a mode of creaturely existence. Faith as a mode of being presupposes both the ontological condition and epistemological readiness to receive truth. One of the ways, in which truth is revealed to mens is through the story of the Bible. As Augustine states in one of the crucial passages in the Confessions:

So since we were too weak to discover the truth by pure reasoning and therefore needed the authority of the sacred writings, I now began to believe that you would never have conferred such preeminent authority on the scripture, now diffused through all lands, unless you had willed that it would be a means of coming to faith in you and a means of seeking to know you...The authority of the Bible seemed the more to be venerated and more worthy of a holy faith on the ground that it was open to everyone to read, while keeping the dignity of its secret meaning for a profounder interpretation159. The Scripture, as a narrative of Israel’s journey, provides a model, an exemplar, of communication between human beings and God, thus serving as a substitute, or alternative mode of knowing the Creator, interpreted spiritually, or figuratively160. Augustine extrapolates the Plotinian method of introspection on to the interpretation of the story of the Bible, in virtue of the fact that, by invoking the narrative of the Scripture, a human being can learn to interpret his own life by mapping it on to the story of return presented in the Scripture. The end and purpose of such mapping is

,S6 Conf i.1.1 157 See the discussion on P. 76 m Sermo 194:2 159 Conf vi.5.8 160 See DCD ii and iii, and DVR viii. 14, xxiv.45 36 nothing less than the vision of one’s life in simultaneity, and achievement of the life of virtue161.

Vision and Speech as Landmarks of True Understanding “Vision” is a very important notion in Augustine, as it symbolizes the internal perception of the truth, distinct from sense-perception, which is in turn usually expressed in the notion of “hearing.” There are many parallels in Augustine between these two concepts, and one of them is beautifully expressed in De Trinitate, where emphasis is placed on vision as true knowledge:

When we say that thoughts are locutions of the heart, we are not denying that they are also visions, arising when they are true from visions of things known. In the external sphere of bodily activity, locution is one thing and vision another; but in the inward realm of our thoughts, both are one and the same. Hearing and sight are two different functions of the bodily sense, but in the mind there is no difference between seeing and hearing. That is why, although outward speech is not seen but heard, the holy Gospel can speak of the inward locutions which are thoughts as seen by our Lord and not heard162. D.W. Johnson makes a very important distinction between vision and speech, or the heard. He says, “God speaks, but man sees.”163 In so doing he contrasts the theory of illumination, which he identifies with the Neoplatonic tradition proper, and of revelation that Augustine holds in his works. Johnson argues his position, stating that Genesis is a story of creation ex nihilo, and as such serves as an allegory of the return of a human being to creaturely perfection. Whereas Plotinus’s doctrine of illumination springs from his theory of emanation, i.e. the origin of the world in a descent from Being itself to the Intelligible realm of being. Thus, the theory of illumination presupposes that the illumined mind is closer to possessing the attributes of pure being, while Augustine’s illumination is not a process of mind’s ascent to the divine Light and subsequent transformation into divinity, but is a notion of a creaturely- character of the mind that in virtue of its capacity to be formed and informed, so to say, can retain its image and likeness to the divinity even in the fallen world.

Illumination and Becoming For what I know of myself I know because you grant me light, and what I do know of myself, I do not know of myself; I do not know until such time as my darkness becomes “like noonday” before your face164.

161 For the discussion on faith as a mode of interpretation of the Scriptures see Chapter Three 162 DT xv.18.10; for detailed description of the distinction between bodily and mental vision of God in Augustine see Margaret Miles’ article “Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine’s De Trinitate and Confessions” in Journal of Religion 63 (1983). Pp. 125-142 163 Johnson, D.W. op. cit. P. 52 164 Conf. x.5.7 37 And,

‘We are transformed’— that is, we are changed from one form into another from a form of obscurity into a form of clear light. Even in obscurity, the form is God’s im age...165. While using the terminology of light, vision, and illumination, Augustine’s “illumination,” at the same time, is not a movement upward from human mind to the supreme Intellect, but is rather a movement within human mens, where Christ as Internal Teacher uncovers the hidden truth, thus guiding a human being toward proper vision (cf. Augustine’s use of blindness), and righteousness in the world of phantasms, or erroneous knowledge166. In the Confessions Augustine provides an extensive treatment of the problem of speech and vision of God in the following passage:

Thus in the gospel the Word speaks through the flesh, and this sounded externally in human ears, so that it should be believed and sought inwardly, found in the eternal truth where the Master who alone is good...teaches all his disciples. There, Lord, I hear your voice speaking to me, for one who teaches us speaks to us, but one who does not teach us, even though he may speak, does not speak to us...He teaches us so that we may know; for he is the Beginning (emphasis added), and he speaks to us167. The notion of speech implies a process of internal perception, or hearing within one’s mens. It is a process of intimate relationship between Christ, the Word of God, who is called the Beginning in the Confessions, as it is through Him that the creation was spoken into existence, thus reflecting the creative power of internal speech. On the other hand, Christ is the supreme measure of human knowing. He directs the soul’s attention to intelligible objects, compelling it to seek understanding. Internal sight, or illumination from within is just an image of the process of understanding that is happening in the human soul. It is a very successful term, as it reflects the fullness and depth of the process of understanding. Vision presupposes containment, or the full embrace of truth, and thus is a powerful metaphor in Augustine’s epistemology. Thus, true speech results in internal vision identified with faith and knowledge. R.A. Markus summarizes the role of the Interior Teacher, understood by Augustine as the Teacher of true meaning, and the concept of illumination in his article “St. Augustine on Signs”:

the illumination is required not to confer upon the “word” its meaning, but rather to generate a verbum of a thing insofar as it is discerned and evaluated in this light. The

165 DT xv.14.8 166 reason for au these words being expressed corporeally is the abyss of this world (emphasis added) and the blindness of the flesh (emphasis added), as a result of which the objects of thought cannot be seen ” (Conf. xiii.23.34) 167 Conf. xi.8.10 38

light is, so to speak, constitutive of the verbum begotten in it...the work of the Interior Teacher is confined to interpreting words already constituted, independently of his activity. Where the Teacher interprets the meaning of signs, illumination as here conceived creates the significance with which it endows its objects168. Augustine’s notion of illumination is, indeed, closer to revelation, or uncovering the hidden meaning of the relations between things in the universe as vestiges, or significant signs, pointing to the Creator. D.E. Daniels points out that the teaching of Christ is directed to the restoration of “the significative power of created things to refer to the Creator. It serves to establish the mirror in which the divine Trinity is seen as in an enigma. And it gives the believer the means wherewith to perform his own creative act whereby he might participate in the Divine Art as he [human being] returns to the memory and knowledge of the Creator”169. Augustine emphasizes the faith element of all knowing due to the hidden nature of spiritual truth, by which it remains beyond the direct perception of the mind. Its hiddenness demands mediation, or the teaching of Christ. In this respect, truthful listening becomes an act of faith, while vision is a reward for the one who hears well. The notion of faithful listening is transformed into the notion of readership, or power of true interpretation of things as significant vestiges of God. Truthful readership provides the means for discovering understanding, and thus of acquiring knowledge.

‘For the invisible things of God from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead’ (Rom. 1:20). This is the return from temporal to eternal things, and the transformation of the old man into the new170. And, Eternity may be seen as an object of understanding ‘through the things that are made’171. Therefore, certainty and knowledge do not come with distancing oneself from the world of things, but through the creative act, or skill, of interpreting them as signs that convey meaning of spiritual relationships between creatures and the Creator. The role of Christ as Interior Teacher is obviously crucial in the process of understanding. As Daniels words it, Christ teaches on the third level of discourse (see Chapter Two), thus prompting the mind of a human being to things that signify the Creator and, in so doing, creating the possibility of self-knowledge, and of vision proper.

168 Markus, R.A. “St. Augustine on Signs.” In Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays', edited by R.A. Markus. New York: Anchor Books Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972. Pp. 84-85 169 Daniels, Donald E. op. cit. P. 51 170 DVR lii.101 171 Conf. xiii.21.31 39 Recollection and Return According to St. Augustine In De beata vitae Augustine points out that,

To possess God, and not to be without God, are two quite different things...He who lives righteously possesses God, that is, has Him propitious to him; he who lives a bad life also possesses God, but as hostile to him. But, whoever, is still seeking God, and has not yet found Him, has Him neither as propitious nor as hostile, yet is not without G od172. On the one hand, the truth revealed through understanding is about the meaning of realities upon which God confers spiritual meaning, thus using them to signify the Creator/creation relationship. On the other hand, this vision presupposes the knowledge of God implanted in mens in the beginning in view of its being created to the image and likeness of the Creator. Therefore, the purpose of illumination, or as we specified earlier, revelation, is to turn the attention of a human being within oneself, thus creating a possibility of self-knowledge and, what Augustine calls, recollection, i.e. understanding that each individual is formed by God to His image and likeness. Once recollection occurs, a human being desires close fellowship with the Creator, and redemption. On the part of the soul this fellowship is realized in personal transformation and life of virtue, in the aptitude for beatific vision of eternity in the life to come. DBV 3.21 (quoted above) suggests that creaturely existence, or human being as becoming, is not deprived of God’s presence. In fact, existence would not be possible if God abandoned His becoming, i.e., creatures completely. In De uera religione Augustine specifically points out that even after the fall “God does not grudge his becoming (emphasis added) as., .he has inward fellowship with him whom

17-5 he loves as himself’ . What Augustine is trying to communicate here is that, it needs to be a willful decision on the part of a human being to be transformed into a true similitude; a human being should learn to desire truth with all his/her soul and mind. As he says in the Confessions,

They approach and are illumined as they receive light. Those who receive it obtain from you ‘power to become your sons’174. Interestingly enough, in De ordine Augustine uses the word “reasonable,” or possessed by reason, as meaningful, or significant of “something over and above the

172 DBV 3.21. Consider also this passage: “It is from love of your love that I make the act of recollection. The recalling of my wicked ways is bitter in my memory, but I do it so that you may be sweet to me, a sweetness touched by no deception, a sweetness serene and content. You gathered me together from the state of disintegration in which I was fruitlessly divided” (Conf. ii.1.1) 173 DVR xlvi.86 174 Conf. viii.4.9 40 delight of the senses” 17S . Significance presupposes likeness to the thing signified but not complete identity176. Illumination is not an end in and of itself, it does not produce knowledge in its final form, and escape from corporeal reality for a human being, but rather is intended for the purpose of understanding, which brings ontological transformation of human mentes into “sons of God,” or “becoming” as a state of human perfection. Therefore, the importance of the illumination/revelation distinction introduced by Johnson points to Augustine’s notion of return as a movement within oneself, not beyond and above, as is the case in Plotinus. The return happens through the revaluation and redirection of one’s life. With the transformation of the self comes the restoration of the world around the transformed human being. Thus, Augustinian “return” is closer to a notion of the proper ordering of one’s self in the fallen condition, creating a possibility for return, and the transformation of human mens111. To summarize the Chapter, we can first distinguish the epistemology proper from the point of view of the nature of mens and its ability to cogitate and recollect the things of the past, as well as the knowledge of God, which the mind has preserved after the Fall. However, Augustine notes that, due to the mutable nature of mens, knowledge per se is impossible without the existence of objective truth mediated by Truth Himself. In other words, the only way we can be sure of the knowledge we possess is if the truth itself were placed above and beyond the judgment of the mind of a human being. To assure the validity and truthful nature of the knowledge perceived by the mind, he introduces the figure of Christ as Inner Teacher, who “speaks” to the human mens, thus providing the means for internal vision of the desired truth. In the Confessions Augustine specifically identifies the knowledge of truth and of the ways of right living with the active power of grace. He says, ”1 may find grace before you, so that to me as I knock may be opened the hidden meaning of your words.”178

1/5 D 0i.ll.34 176 Consider this passage: “Or, how did the inchoative spiritual creation merit from Thee, even to ebb and flow darkly like the abyss, but unlike Thee unless it were turned by the same Word to the same being by whom it was made, and, enlightened by Him, could become light-though not as an equal, but still conformed to a form equal to Thee?” (Conf. xiii.2.3) 177 Consider this passage: “Thou dost gather in my whole being from this dispersion and deformity, and conform and confirm me for the eternal” (Conf. xii. 16.23) 178 Conf. xi.2.4 41

Augustine introduces three conduits of knowledge: (1) through senses; (2) through the internal sense (or self-knowledge); and (3) through faith, or through the interpretation of one’s life as mapped on to the biblical story of return of the Prodigal Son (to be discussed in detail in Chapter Three). Fundamentally, human epistemology, according to St. Augustine has God as its object of knowledge, the possession of which requires personal transformation into the similitude of the Trinity, and determines the happy life of an individual. II. Augustine’s Sign-Theory as Linguistic Theory of Meaning Preserved and Actualized through Language To give an outline of themes to be discussed in Chapter Two and Three, we can distinguish four characteristics of language that are significant for Augustine’s sign theory, and his philosophy of becoming. (1) Language preserves in temporality, indicates, and is the means for the expression of the ontological meaning conferred by God and inherent in reality; (2) Language is the means of transmittance of meaning (intended by a speaker), and is thus a tool of intercommunication, i.e. understanding, in a human society; (2.1) In addition it is highly allegorical, i.e. has a capacity to signify on three levels of discourse, and is thus a tool of interpretation and understanding, in general; (2.2) In this light it is a means of interpretation of the Scriptures, in particular; (3) Language reveals and envelops God’s truth; (3.1) By analogy, it can signify the relationship between the creation and the Creator; (4) Language is a mode of human existence and a channel of becoming a true image of God.

11.1. Language as a Gift of God, and His Natural Sign As briefly stated in Chapter One, sign is a very important category in Augustine’s philosophy of becoming, precisely by reason of its inferential character. Augustine treats the concept of sign in detail and builds a theory of signification that deals with the problem of meaning and the transmittance of knowledge in human society, in general. He remains concerned with the problem of the certitude of knowledge, and hopes to achieve some confidence via his theory of signification, i.e. via the relationship between things and signs by means of which the human mens perceives visible and invisible realities. Although not exclusively linguistic in character, Augustine primarily discusses the theory of language as a system of significant signs by means of which humans exchange knowledge, and communicate meaning to each other. Thus, we can say, that Augustine is primarily interested in the question of human cognition as a condition of the knowledge of God. However, the question is not limited to the problem of human epistemology, but is subordinated to a metaphysical problem of meaning, that is associated with the question of existence, in general, and of order intended in the universe. Augustine believes that language is a powerful tool of intercommunication, i.e. transmittance of meaning. Consequently, he conceives of language as a mode of 43 human existence and of becoming a true image of God. It can help us discover a pattern according to which created things, as inferential entities, can lead us to the knowledge of God, i.e. to His possession. In this way, his philosophical project directs him toward the transcendence of temporality and corporeity, so as to return him to the original creaturely mode of existence intended by God in the act of creation.

Liberal Arts Augustine uses the creation and, what he thinks of as natural gifts, i.e. given by God to humanity, to accomplish his philosophical task. In De doctrina Christiana he develops a set of disciplines, called the liberal arts, each of which has a particular use and purpose in the creation. These arts are in turn used as means to strengthen “the acuity of mind necessary for the apprehension of eternal truths”1. In the Soliloquies he emphasizes that liberal arts provide an order of learning, which is very important for the formation of a human being in the image of God2. In De doctrina Christiana and in De Magistro he suggests that the arts reveal the pattern of human cognition, which serves as a premise for the knowledge of divinely instituted order, and of God as its end. Augustine distinguishes between divinely instituted arts, and human institutions3. He identifies the divinely instituted arts as those that can lead humans to the knowledge of God. Marcia Colish suggests that for the purpose of his epistemology Augustine uses the trivium— grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic— as a set of disciplines that “provide [them] with epistemological methods, linguistic forms, and criteria which they used in theorizing how words functioned as cognitive intermediaries between subject and object and between speaker and audience”4. Thus, grammar provides linguistic rules according to which language, and by extension human cognition operates. Rhetoric, as God intended it in the beginning, is concerned with the correct transference of meaning, i.e. truth. Dialectic reveals the hidden relationship between things and signs in the hierarchy of being and knowing. The latter relationship is dialectical in character, as Mark Jordan points out5. According to him, a sign is either

1 Baker, Peter Harte. “Liberal Arts as Philosophic Liberation: St. Augustine’s De Magistro.” In Arts Libéraux et Philosophie Au Moyen Age. Montréal: Institut d’Etudes Médiévales, 1969. P. 469 2 Solil. i. 13.23 3 See DDC ii.68; ii.94, 102, 103; 117,120, 128, 136 4 Colish, Marcia L. The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge. Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. P. viii 5 Jordan, Mark D. “Words and Word: Incarnation and Signification in Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana.” In Augustinian Studies 11 (1980). P. 196 44 a sign, or a thing depending on its use. The mind possesses the capacity to distinguish and analyze signs and things and, hence, to judge the degree of necessity according to its own knowledge. Donald Daniels suggests the following division as a way of ordering the degrees of necessity, the human mind is able to distinguish and analyze:

The first kind of necessity derives from conventional rules of syntax whether they be grammatical or logical. The second kind of necessity derives from the rules of thought, which govern the relations between thought and things. The third kind of necessity derives from ontological rules that govern things6. Based on this division, the author suggests three levels of discourse in Augustine that govern his theory of signification, i.e.: sensible, conceptual, and intelligible discourses. I would substitute the latter with “spiritual,” so as to make clear the distinction between Augustine’s theory of signification and a Neoplatonic concept of ascent as the basis of human epistemology. Otherwise, it is a very helpful division, as it describes how language functions as a useful tool in Augustine’s epistemology, i.e. functioning not only on the level of linguistic meaning and its denotation of reality, but on a larger scale to interpret the extra-linguistic meaning of things as indices of spiritual reality culminating in God. Thus we see that Augustine is concerned with linguistic meaning not for its own sake, but because he believes that language is inherently significant of God, and, as a gift to humanity, that it can be used as a vestige of the Creator. Another commentator, Peter Harte Baker, points out that at the heart of all signifying lies dialectic, which also governs the rule of thought, and as such examines the truth of words at the moment of their perception by the mind. He suggests that, “Dialectic aims at evidence, and evidence is presence, whether it be the presence of sensibles to the senses or of the intelligibles to mind... all speech has as its purpose the revelation of knowledge”7. Therefore, according to Baker, the rule of thought besides establishing the degree of necessity of knowledge reveals the hidden connection between the signifier and the signified, thus creating the possibility for the occurrence of an act of knowing. In other words, there is no meaning outside of cognition, i.e. words signify not for their own sake, but in order to reveal meaning to human understanding. The meaning is actualized, i.e. becomes evident, in the process of

6 Daniels, Donald E. op. cit. P. 45 7 Baker, Peter Harte. op. cit. P. 478 45 cognition. Or, as Peter H. Baker notes in the same article, the rule of signifying is useless unless it leads the human mens to the knowledge of God8.

Three Senses of “Word” According to St. Augustine In this Chapter our primary purpose is to discuss Augustine’s theory of signification as a linguistic theory of meaning, and as a tool of human epistemology, with verbum as its key concept. Augustine distinguishes three senses of verbum:

We must distinguish three senses of ‘word’. First, the word temporally extended in syllables, whether spoken aloud or only thought. Second, anything known and fixed in the mind, so long as memory retains it for production and definition, though the thing itself be displeasing. Third, that in the mental conception of which we take pleasure9. “Word” is understood as (1) a sensible object of human perception, (2) an image imprinted on the mind of things experienced and stored in memory, and (3) a concept which has purely mental character. Thus, for instance, in De doctrina Christiana and in De Magistro he treats “word” as a corporeal sign, signifying a thing; while in De Trinitate he is primarily concerned with “word” as concept or idea, bearing mental character and spiritual nature10. Before we move into the actual theory of signification, it is important to emphasize that, within his theory Augustine conflates linguistic and extra linguistic meaning, as a result of which his theory of signification becomes complex. Thus, talking of significant signs, he distinguishes between “word” as a semantic unit, and as a concept born in the mind, having a non-linguistic mental nature. In other words, he builds a theory of reference11, in which each phenomenon regardless of its character and origin is placed in a certain order in the hierarchy of things, a hierarchy which can be divided into two categories: signs, i.e. means pointing to something beyond themselves, and things, i.e. the final stage (end) or object of a reference. Ultimately, only God is the final stage; He is the end. All other things are but signs pointing to Him. But even within this hierarchy, things stand in a certain relationship to each other, and depending on their value they are either signs pointing to, or things pointed at. Regardless of its inferential ontological character, we can observe a tendency that, while Augustine’s linguistic theory of signification is subordinated to

8 Baker, Peter Harte. op. cit. P. 475 9Drix.l5.10 10 Ibid. xv.22 11 The distinction between the linguistic theory of signification, and the theory of reference arises from reading R.A. Markus’s article “Augustine on Signs,” where he mentions that Augustine is not interested in language from the point of view of the theory of signification, but rather in the context of a theory of inference (P. 63) 46 his metaphysical theory of reference, still language as mode of being functions as root 12 metaphor for the functioning of the metaphysical theory of reference as a whole. In other words, he uses language as a first level discursive sign, which leads the mind to the apprehension of third level discursive signs, which signify the ontological relationships between things in the hierarchy of being, thus seeking the end, the supreme thing in the hierarchy, i.e. God. This dynamic will be further clarified as we continue discussing Augustine’s sign theory and his theory of reference.

Use/Enjoyment; and Means/End Distinctions The inferential means/end character within the hierarchy of being is supplemented, in Augustine, with another distinction, namely of use and enjoyment. In De doctrina Christiana Augustine describes use and enjoyment in such a way, that only God can be enjoyed as the only supreme thing, whereas the creation should be used, and a human being (one’s neighbour) can only be enjoyed as an image of God:

Only God can be enjoyed in a literal sense. A human being should be enjoyed in a transferred sense, as an image of God. Therefore, by enjoying a human being, we enjoy God.. .God is a thing to enjoy, a human being is a thing enjoying: and all the divine scripture is to love the thing which must be enjoyed and the thing which together with us can enjoy that thing13. Augustine uses this distinction to interpret the Scripture and all the meaning of the virtues and vices. If someone starts to enjoy things that are to be used, he becomes a slave to sin, because his vision is directed not toward God but toward a thing of the creation, which will age and vanish in time. In De doctrina Christiana 1.92 he makes an interesting comment about the difference between temporal and eternal things: temporal things are enjoyed when desired, and eternal when possessed. It is the mutability and changeability of temporal things that renders them as objects of use, not of enjoyment. For when possessed such a thing cannot satisfy eternally, but only for the time being. But an eternal thing can be enjoyed forever, as it does not know

12 The term “root metaphor” was first introduced by Stephen Pepper in his book World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence. (Berkeley, 1942). Pepper defines the root-metaphor method in the following way: “A man desiring to understand the world looks about for a clue to its comprehension. He pitches upon some areas of common-sense fact and tries if he cannot understand other areas in terms of this one. This original area becomes then his basic analogy or root metaphor” (op. cit. P. 91). However, in his Introduction to The Journal of Mind and Behavior (Vol. 3. No. 3, 1982) he clarifies that, “The term ‘root metaphor’ seems to have entered the language of philosophy in other ways than that of the source of the categories of world hypotheses. It has come often to refer to any central idea about which any complex problem can be organized. It becomes then the point of reference (emphasis added) for a restricted or special hypothesis. When so used it overlaps the function lately assigned by extending it over what has come to be known as the ‘paradigm case’.” (P. 203) 13 DDC i.74-75, 79, 84 47 change and corruption. The Scripture for Augustine is to be used, for example. Not that it is a temporal thing. It is expressed in words that are signs, but its language is autonomous of temporal verbal signs. It has atemporal meaning (true meaning), which can be grasped through illumination from within. Nevertheless, it is only a means to faith, hope and love. When the latter are possessed, the Scripture is used only for the purpose of instructing others14. To this point we can conclude that the things to be used are usually means to some end, which can in turn be the end, or, is more often, a means to yet a higher end, i.e. a thing to be enjoyed. In the Confessions Augustine suggests a gift/fruit analogy to explain his notion of means and the end. He says,

I have learned from Thee, O my God, to distinguish the gift from the fruit. The gift is the thing itself which a person hands over in bestowing these necessities; for instance, money, food, drink, clothing, shelter, assistance. But, the fruit is the good and right will o f the giver15. In principle, only God is the thing to be enjoyed proper. He is the end of the creation’s striving for eternity. What is true of God in an absolute sense is true of any object of signification.

things signified are of greater importance than their signs. Whatever exists on account of something else must necessarily be of less value than that on account of which it exists... [Tjhings universally are to be preferred to their signs...[T]he knowledge, then, conveyed by this word from you to him or from him to you, is more valuable than the word itself16. Indeed, “knowledge is superior to the sign simply because it is the end towards which the latter is the means.”17 There is another interesting connection between the notions of use/enjoyment and means/end in Augustine. One can move from means to ends, to be sure, but one can also move from ends to means, from the ends we would enjoy to the things of use that will take us to the things we are to enjoy.

So the love of the end may cause it to seek for the means: it loves the known end and therefore seeks the unknown means18. As mentioned in Chapter One, the mode of human existence in the postlapsarian world is temporality and mutability. In such a world, human beings reach their ultimate goal by means of intermediary stages, which bring him/her closer

14 DDC i.93 15 Conf. xiii.26.41 16 DDC ix.25 17 Ibid. ix.26 '*DTx.5 48 to the fixed and final goal. Such staged movement causes the soul to want the end ever more, serving thus as a stimulus for growth.

11.2. Sign-Theory Proper

Signum/Res Distinction I would like to start with the concept of sign. A sign, in Augustine, is something that stands for, or signifies something else. He calls it improper res, as the sign itself is also a thing, for what is not a thing, does not exist19. This view comes from the Neoplatonic tradition, which treats a relation between two things as a separate entity with a being of its own. The reality of relations indeed makes Augustine’s theory of reference possible. One thing can stand for another, precisely because they participate within a web of metaphysical entities and therefore, belong to one order. Going back to the notion of sign, Augustine defines it as follows, “...a sign is a thing which of itself makes some other thing come to mind, besides the impression that it presents to the senses”20. From this it follows that alongside appearances and sense impressions signs are also significant. In De dialectica he makes the following distinction,

since we are unable to speak of words except by words and since we do not speak unless we speak of some things, the mind recognizes that words are signs of things, without ceasing to be things...that which the mind not the ears perceives from the word and which is held within the mind itself is called a dicibile. When a word is spoken not for its own sake but for the sake of signifying something else, it is called a dictio. The thing itself.. .is called.. .a res21. Thus we can distinguish between res as a sign that signifies objects, and the significance, i.e. meaning associated usually with proper res (see the discussion on the origin of meaning). At this stage we can conclude that, a sign is a thing bearing certain significance that is interpreted by human mens. There is another very important feature of a sign; it is always a means to some greater end22, and we can add, a presence of the withdrawn Sign, present to humans only through allegories23.

19 DDC i.4 20 Ibid. ii.l; also see DD 7.13 21 DD 5.5 22 De Magistro ix.26 23 See the discussion on Christ as a Sign of God, and of figurative, metaphorical meaning as true meaning of the spiritual reality in Chapter Four 49 Types of Signs Signs can be natural (signa naturalia), and intentionally given (signa data). Natural signs are those, “which without a wish or any urge to signify cause something else besides themselves to be known from them, like smoke, which signifies fire”24. And given signs are those,

which living things give to each other, in order to show, to the best of their ability, the emotions of their minds, or anything that they have felt or learnt. There is no reason for us to signify something...except to express and transmit to another’s mind what is in the mind of the person who gives the sign...[E]ven the divinely given signs contained in the holy scriptures have been communicated to us by the human beings who wrote them25. Thus, signa data are intended for the purpose of inter-communication, and the transmittance of knowledge and truth in human society. There are signs that signify things, and there are those that signify as indication26. Beside power to signify things, signs can signify other signs and themselves, which makes language an incredible tool, significant not only of the reality, but of itself as well. Like when we say “name,” or “sign,” the written sign actually signifies itself.

‘ Verbum’ both is a word and signifies a word. ‘D icibile’ is a word; however, it does not signify a word but what is understood in the word and contained in the mind. ‘D ictio’ is also a word, but it signifies both the first two, that is, the word itself and what is brought about in the mind by means of the word. ‘Res' is a word which signifies whatever remains beyond the three that have been mentioned27. If we distinguish between actual sign, thing and meaning, here Augustine shows that the words “sign,” “thing,” and “meaning” belong to a category of self-reflexive, or reciprocal signs signifying themselves28, or that they are nomen signifying signs, not things. Peter H. Baker calls nomina the signs of second order discourse29. There is a certain gradation of significance intended by the speaker in sign giving. There are signs expressing emotions; there are mere utterances, or symptoms. Moreover, there are other signs that are significant in a proper sense, i.e. which are charged with meaning. These latter are called symbols. Among them there are words—written or spoken, gestures, sign language, miming. In De dialectica Augustine defines articulate utterance as spoken sign:

24 DDC ii.2 25 Ibid. ii.3 26 De Magistro x.34 27 DD 6.25 28 See Jackson, Dareil B. “The Theory of Signs in St. Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana." In Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays', edited by R.A. Markus (New York, 1972) on the reflexive and reciprocal nature of language 29 Baker, Peter Harte, op. cit. P. 473 50

To speak is to give a sign by means of an articulate utterance. By an articulate utterance I mean one which can be expressed in letters30. In the beginning of the Confessions, for instance, he identifies baby cries with the indication of a physical need. In virtue of such an approach, Augustine’s theory of signification becomes a valuable tool to understand human epistemology in the context of general psychology. Such an understanding does not limit his discourse to words alone, but leaves room for all other kinds of symbol making. Augustine distinguishes further between visible (sensible) and intelligible signs31, and among the former there are signs mostly given to eyes and ears. We will return to this distinction in him but must pass on for now to continue our analysis of intentional signs (signa data). Among intentionally given signs, words are most important, and are privileged in Augustine, because only words allow us to communicate and preserve in memory ideas, conceptions, and knowledge in general. Words are signs that can be given in literal and metaphorical sense. Words are used in a literal sense, “when used to signify the things for which they were invented”32, and in the metaphorical sense— ’’when the actual things which we signify by particular words are used to signify something else” . This theme will be discussed in detail in Chapter Three. As the most important intentionally given significant signs (Augustine also calls them semantic units in De Magistro), words are compounds of sound and letters34. In this respect we should distinguish between written and spoken words. “Written words are visible. Spoken words are audible”35. Written words are letters that form another set of signs. Thus, written words are signs of words as a class of significant signs. And spoken words are “meaningful articulate sounds”36. Words, as described here, are corporeal entities, but what they signify is mental. Later on I will discuss the hierarchy of a word, and we’ll see that what written and spoken words signify is verbum mentis, or word proper. Words have a distinct purpose in the act of inter-communication, and in human existence in general. Words are stimula, they direct our attention to a thing

30 DD 5.7 31 De Magistro iv.8 32 DDC ii.28 33 Ibid. 34 De Magistro v. 14 35 Ibid. iv.8; also see DDC ii.8 36 Ibid. iv.8 51 signified . As Augustine himself words it, they put us on alert and make us ready to learn . On the one hand, words as signs of reality and events in the life of a human being orient him/her in the world of things. On the other hand, things encountered in daily activities can be transferred into images (which constitute a second kind of words in Augustine) and stored in memory, from which they can be recalled to remind a human being of his/her past experience. As Eugene Vance points out, in Augustine, “things themselves cannot be known directly by the mind, and knowledge of things must pass through signs”39. We preserve in memory the knowledge of things, and when we encounter them again, we remember their meaning. In Augustine’s own words, “.. .speech is nothing but a calling to remembrance of the realities of which the words are but signs, for the memory, which retains the words and turns them over and over, causes the realities to come to mind”40. In the sphere of inter-communication words serve an informative purpose, i.e. the purpose of reminding someone or oneself of something. We also use words when we pray. As Augustine meditates upon this question with his son in De Magistro, we cannot use words in order to inform God of anything. He knows what is in our mind before we ever uttered our thoughts. Therefore, concludes Augustine, in prayer we use words to bring the realities of things we are praying about into our mind in order to express ourselves. In addition, says Augustine, on the level of human cognition words serve the purpose of actualization of the invisible thoughts41. This comment has a crucial significance. Used in relation to prayer, it reflects the confessional nature of language, which bears a transformative power upon human becoming. In Augustine, thought that is of a non-linguistic nature has to be externalized by the speaker in order to be made known to oneself and to others. Verbalization is one of the most powerful ways of communication. Nevertheless, in the case of prayer, language brings forth judgment that, as discussed in Chapter One, is the mind’s inherent capacity to discern truth. Judgment is the mind’s return to itself. By verbalizing what is inside, a human being is materializing a judgment as to himself, a judgment, which causes him to repent, or in case of worship— to become truly an image of God. In De Gene si ad

31DDC i.13 38 De Magistro xiv.46 39 Vance, Eugene. “St. Augustine: Language as Temporality.” In Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes; edited by John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. London: University Press of New England, 1982. P. 22 40 De Magistro i.2 41 Conf. xiii.23.34 52 litteram Augustine interprets God’s question in the Garden of Eden as urging Adam to repent. God knew of his sin, but needed him to give a verbal answer, as verbalization brings actual judgment upon oneself, and urges one to repent.

Things and Types of Things If signs are signifiers, then a thing (res), in Augustine, is what is signified. Here is an account of res in Augustine’s works. In De doctrina Christiana, res is a thing signified by a sign. There is a direct relation of signification between a res and a sign. In De dialectica, res is what a sign designates (the meaning of a thing, i.e. dicible). In De Magistro 39 and De Trinitate XV.21, it is something perceived by the senses of the body or by the mind. In the Confessions XII.23, res is the end toward which verbum tends. These views on res are consistent in Augustine’s theory of signification if we remember that we are looking into two theories of signification: the one purely linguistic, where res is the end, and a thing in the proper sense, i.e. object in reality perceived by the mind; and the second a theory of reference, where a thing is a sign of another thing in the hierarchy of being and where knowing points to the Trinity as supreme Thing, the final end in the hierarchy of inferential signs, the object of enjoyment. There are sensible and intelligible things, the first known by the senses and the second by mind alone42. There are also things visible and invisible, or corporeal and spiritual43. Intelligible things sometimes coincide with things spiritual in Augustine. However, they are not reduced to one another. Spiritual things are more important than corporeal things, as the latter are subject to change and corruption, unlike the former, which are eternal. Augustine classifies things in many different ways, depending on their relationship to the Creator. There are things to be used and to be enjoyed; and thus derived from things useful and necessary, the proper understanding of which is a beginning of virtue. There are also things that are unnecessary or indulgent, things that are subject to sin leading humans to all kinds of vices. Things can be apprehended by bodily senses, by the mind, apprehended through themselves, or through images imprinted on the mind44. Regarding the latter two, Augustine is referring to the idea that natural things, present to the eyes, other senses of the body, and to the mind are perceived directly, while the things absent are

42 De Magistro xii.39 43 Conf. xii. 17 53 perceived only through the images they imprint on the mind, and store in memory45. Augustine emphasizes that, what is stored in the mind, and what is apprehended when the thing is present to the senses is not the thing itself, but its impression. Therefore, things preserved in the mind are realities (meaning) of things observed in reality, or remembered46. This argument is intended against the Stoic theory of signs, which treats both thought and meaning as material entities stored in mind. Marcia Colish gives a handy account of the Stoic theory of signs,

For the Stoics, all real beings are corporeal. Words, being physically produced and physically received, are themselves corporeal and accurate signs of the realities they represent47. Augustine opposes the Stoics by arguing that images stored in memory are of a non- corporeal character, and what is produced and transferred in the course of communication is meaning, while images and things themselves never enter human cognition. Peter Baker points out another argument that Augustine might have had when he opposed Stoic , namely that for Augustine only God is immediate, who in the fallen condition of mens is mediated through the creation. Augustine strives to find a way, by which mens could transcend the mediation of signs. In addition he works to establish how the knowledge of God is possible at all (if unfeasible in the current condition). Baker interprets Augustine as able to argue that if signs are material entities, “this kind of immediacy would not be accessible to a mind seduced by the immediacy of material things and abstractions from them”48. Moreover, as we will see later in the discussion, Augustine argues that there is no direct correlation between language and reality. All knowledge of things is drawn only from the Eternal Wisdom of God49, and not from learning the meaning of things. Meaning has a given character in the creation. Humans do not constitute, but discover it50. In this argument Augustine expresses the irreducible triadic relationship between object, sign, and subject, where subject, i.e. the mind, perceives and transfers only the meaning, and where res cannot be confused with signs. Augustine was the first one to introduce such a relationship. Prior to him philosophers like the Stoics were primarily concerned with the relationship between a sign and a thing. While for Augustine,

44 DT xv.21, and De Magistro x.32 45 De Magistro xii.39 46 Ibid. i.2 47 Colish, Marcia, op. cit. P. viii 48 Baker, Peter Harte. op. cit. P. 475 49 De Magistro xi.38 50 See the discussion on Pp. 56, 87 54 according to R.A. Markus, “a thing is a sign... precisely insofar as it stands fo r something to somebody”51, thus emphasizing the role of language as a tool of human cognition.

11.3. Nature of the Relationship Between: a Sign and a Thing; and Between a Sign and a Speaker (the Process of Cognition)

Origin of Meaning Augustine’s philosophy of signification presents a very important linguistic and philosophic problem of the origin of meaning. The fundamental question is whether meaning is inherent in the world, or whether the human mind conveys meaning to reality. Thus, arises another question, derived from the philosophical problem of being and meaning, namely a question of the nature of the relationship between a sign and a thing, and between a sign and a speaker. The second dichotomy, namely between a sign and a speaker is characteristic of Augustine’s theory of signification. He looks into both kinds of relationships, but seems hesitant as to the question of the origin of meaning. We start with the first relationship. Augustine calls this relationship a relationship of true meaning52. It is precisely so because this relationship is divinely constituted. We learn the meaning of a word; we do not constitute it. The Interior Teacher, Christ within teaches us the realities of things, i.e. their meaning, and provides means of understanding. Donald Daniels points out that Christ teaches the human mens at the third level of discourse, thus establishing the connection between things as vestiges signifying the Creator53. Augustine also emphasizes that meaning is learned from an object which acquires its significance at the moment of creation. Meaning then is inherent in things and events by the creative power of God. Thus, as Joseph Mazzeo suggests, the meaning of the narrative of a stone on which Jacob slept, reported in the Scriptures, is significant of the that occurred, and is not exhausted by the phrase used to speak of it. In other words, the narrative is meaningful of the event only if viewed metaphorically, and that is the primary task of all thinking, to identify things as vestiges of the Creator. Augustine repeatedly

51 Markus, R.A. “St. Augustine on Signs.” In Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, op. cit. P. 74 52 Conf. xii.14 53 Daniels, D.E. op. cit. P. 49 55 emphasizes that we learn meaning from the thing signified, and not from sign alone54. Thus, when Augustine defines allegory in De Trinitate, he stresses the following:

But when the apostle talked of allegory, he did not find it in words but in a fact, arguing that the two testaments are to be understood from the two sons of Abraham, one bom of the slave woman, the other of the free; this was not just said— it happened. And before he explained it its meaning was obscure55. This is a key passage for Augustine’s theory of interpretation, as it reveals that human epistemology is by nature allegorical, a feature that makes becoming possible at all. This and other related themes will be discussed in detail in Chapters Three and Four. To return to the role of the Interior Teacher, R.A. Markus makes an interesting observation as regards illumination and the origin of meaning:

the illumination is required not to confer upon the ‘word’ its meaning, but rather to generate a verbum of a thing insofar as it is discerned and evaluated in this light. The light is, so to speak, constitutive of the verbum begotten in it.. .the work of the Interior Teacher is confined to interpreting words already constituted, independently of his activity. Where the Teacher interprets the meaning of signs, illumination as here conceived creates the significance with which it endows its objects56. If we go back to the problem of illumination and revelation, discussed in Chapter One, we will find Markus’s comment most helpful in understanding Augustine’s own position. For him illumination is not an enlightenment of the mind, but rather an understanding of Verbum, the true speech of God, on the one hand; and on the other, true interpretation of the meaning intended by God for each thing in the creation. In De Magistro, Augustine expresses this view in terms of hearing: “Our real Teacher is he who is so listened to (emphasis added), who is said to dwell in the inner man, namely Christ, that is, the unchangeable power and eternal wisdom”57.

Problem of Learning In De Trinitate X.4 and throughout the entire De Magistro Augustine introduces another theme, namely that we recall rather than leam. That is, Augustine argues that no one learns by means of words. A teacher does not teach by words, but by questioning a student, who by way of looking inside, bears a judgment upon the truth of the matter. In other words, a teacher reminds a student of the knowledge that everyone bears in the mind; he/she does not put the actual knowledge into the student’s head. Consequently, everyone has to evaluate the truth, and give ascent to it

54 De Magistro x.34 55D rxv.3.15 56 Markus, R.A. “St. Augustine on Signs.” In Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, op. cit. Pp. 84-85 57 De Magistro xi.38 56 in the mind. Peter Baker interprets Augustine’s problem of learning as recognition by the mind of the principles, which are the truth’s own58. We should not confuse Augustine’s view on the problem of learning with the Neoplatonic doctrine of reminiscence that presupposes that a human being forgets everything at birth, but that through questioning he/she is reminded of the knowledge possessed in previous life. It is clear that Augustine’s Christian views would not permit him to hold such beliefs. Nonetheless, throughout his dialogues he continuously uses the Socratic method of doubt and reminding while teaching his own students. I would tend to think that Augustine avoids the possibility of teaching through words for three reasons: (1) meaning is inherent in things, not in words. (2) meaning is of a non-corporeal nature, and cannot be transferred from one mind to another, but has to be discovered, or assented to by each individual; (3) language as a mode of human existence is a temporary condition of the human mens, and is thus of a lower order than the mens itself.

Sign/Thing Relationship. Allegorical and Ontological Relationships According to St. Augustine We now return to the nature of relationship between a sign and a thing. Immediately we run into a paradox. On the one hand, Augustine stresses that there is no direct connection between words and signified reality. In the Confessions, he argues that, it is hard to express oneself in words. We are always looking for words to fit the phenomenon we experience59. In other words if there were a direct connection between a sign and a thing, we would not have the flexibility of language that we do. Every word would have signified a particular thing, and the meaning of words would have been always fixed. On the one hand, as the purpose of language is to signify reality and communicate meaning, there must exist some connection between the two. R.A. Markus suggests that although Augustine does not posit an obvious connection between language and reality, “a sign must have similitudo in some sense to its object...which, in addition to likeness, involves some form of existential dependence on the original”60. In De Trinitate Augustine identifies similitudo with imago, as “form printed on the sense-organ, a product of the object only, of which this form is a

58 Baker, Peter Harte. op. cit. P. 478 59 Conf. xii.6, xiii.7 60 Markus, R.A. “St. Augustine on Signs.” In Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, op. cit. P. 87 57 likeness or image, distinct from the object itself’61. Does it mean then, that the meaning of a word, or any other significant sign, is a form of the object itself? If so it would have to be conceived as a certain stage in the hierarchy of its being, one transferred from the extra-linguistic sphere of human existence to a mode of being, called language, which must itself be understood as extratemporal. As mentioned, Augustine conflates linguistic and extra-linguistic meanings. Linguistic is the meaning of a word understood and preserved by the mind; extra- linguistic is the knowledge of things, also stored in the mind in the form of mental images. In a sense, this conflation rises from Augustine’s treatment of words and objects of reality as res. What he is trying to express in De Trinitate XI. 1 is that, whether words are considered as articulate sounds, or as things experienced in reality, they do not enter the mind as material entities, but are rather conceptual images, which are signs, indicators of articulate sounds and reality as such. In the process Augustine conflates the allegorical relationship between a sign and a thing, and analogical relationship of things in the hierarchy of being. In this sense he uses “meaning” in two ways. On the one hand, things possess meaning due to their creaturely character and the proper place they occupy in the hierarchy of being. As such they serve as pointers to God and can be used by the mind as means to His knowledge. God institutes their meaning. Thus, it is precisely Christ, the Interior Teacher, who reveals this type of meaning to human understanding. Language, on the other hand, is also a divinely instituted sign, and as such is not a human invention. Humans can communicate meaning, but have not introduced the linguistic rule. In some sense, we can say that Augustine’s theory of signification as linguistic theory evolves into a theory of reference, in which a sign has an ontological and existential dependence on the thing signified. Sign is not a linguistic category any more, but a thing pointing to another thing in the hierarchy of being instituted by God and charged with His atemporal meaning.

Sign/Speaker Relationship Augustine was original in introducing a triadic relationship of a Sign-Thing- Subject. While the first type of relationship, namely between a sign and a thing is called a relationship of true meaning, the second one, i.e. between Sign-Thing-

61 DT xi.l 58 Speaker, is called surface meaning62. This type of relationship is conventional for Augustine, or as he calls it a relationship of a “basic ”63.

All these meanings...derive their effects on the mind from each individual’s agreement with a particular convention.. .People did not agree to use them because they were already meaningful; rather they became meaningful because people agreed to use them64. This relationship is characterized by the term “surface meaning” in view of the fact that it is mediated through the body, and through the creation. That could be another reason for Augustine to say that, it is safer to make meaning a constitutive part of the order of being, rather than to place its origin in the mind of a human being. The creation, though corrupted by the original sin, does not have a will of its own, but is subject to God’s command. God has instituted a certain order in the world, which cannot be changed. The creation itself is subject to change, but the order does not bear temporal meaning, it rather embraces the meaning of the whole of the creation. The question of the relationship between a sign and a speaker is clear, it is conventional. The meaning of a sign is learned by the speaker from the thing encountered, and interpreted for mens by the Interior Teacher. What is problematic is, how the meaning of a sign is transferred from one mind to another, and thus how communication is possible. Augustine solves this problem by stating that the transfer is accomplished by the power of contemplation.

There again if my hearer sees these things himself with his inward eye, he comes to know what I say, not as a result of my words but as a result of his own contemplation...He is taught not by my words but by the things themselves which inwardly God has made manifest to him65. In other words, each individual being created in the image and likeness of God possesses a power of cognition, with which one is capable of apprehending the truth, which is, in turn, above the mind. Contemplation provides modes of access, wherewith the mind can know the truth. In addition to the power of contemplation, the intention of both parties is very important. Augustine points out a very interesting feature of a word. Every word has a true meaning, given by God, and even if the meaning is distorted, it is still true in the sense that it has been distorted66.

One person transfers from himself what is not his own, and one receives from the other what is his own. But when good and faithful people lend such a work to others who are

62 Conf. xii. 14 63 Ibid. i.13 64 DDC ii.94 65 De Magistro xii.40 66 DT v.24 59

good and faithful, both parties are saying what is their own, because the God to whom their words belong is their own, and because people who live aright, according to what they have been unable to write for themselves, make such writings their own67. Because meaning is not the mind’s own, it is impossible to distort a true meaning. This is a very interesting point in Augustine, as it highlights the image and likeness- character of the human mens, which possesses both an internal sense of discernment, and the capacity to hear the Interior Teacher, who is always present to the mind, and who reveals the way to truth. As Augustine says in his Confessions,

Within me, within the lodging of my thinking, there would speak a truth which is neither Hebrew nor Greek nor Latin nor any barbarian tongue and which uses neither mouth not tongue as instruments and utters no audible syllables68. The word that we bear inside is charged with meaning, which is accessed via discernment and judgment. Via such means of access we confront our own iniquities. We will discuss these matters further when we come to consider the verbum mentis. For now we turn to Peter Baker’s interesting insight into Augustine’s theory of signification. He suggests that,

words are incomplete, means, principiated, and...the knowledge of mind is their completion, end, and principle...Augustine treats words or signs as needing meaning as a completion. They are teleologically ordered to meaning. Words and the meaning of words are related in an order, the former being posterior to the latter69. Thus, Baker repeats the aforementioned assumption that there is no meaning outside of cognition, i.e. words possess meaning by way of signifying something to somebody, in which the significance of both Augustine’s triads, i.e. sign-thing-subject and sign-thing-speaker, become evident. Language is ordered on the basis of a divinely instituted rule of grammar, logic and dialectic. Its primary purpose is the transmittance and indication of meaning, which however exists independently of language.

11.4. Augustine’s Use of Verbum As discussed above Augustine uses verbum in three senses: (1) “utterance” (vox), and uttered word (verbum vocis), i.e. significant sound uttered when we speak70. Not every utterance is significant71; (2) “name” (nomen)— associated with significant signs, or verbum giving definition to things and signs. Name is a mental

67 DDC iv. 161 68 Conf. xi.3.5 69 Baker, Peter Harte. op. cit. P. 477 70 DT xv.2.20 71 De Magistro iv.9 60 aspect72 that is preserved in the mind in the form of mental images. Augustine distinguishes between verburn vocis and nomen in De Magistro, emphasizing that, “verbum is derived from verberare, to strike the ear, nomen from the mental process of reminding” . Thus, verbum vocis is an articulate and written form present to the senses, while nomen is directly perceived by the mind, in the inner vision of mens. The third use of verbum is verbum mentis—what Augustine defines as the “mental conception in which we take pleasure”74. Verbum mentis is the central concept in his theory of signification, and quite significant for the purposes of human epistemology and the problem of transmittance and interpretation of meaning. Therefore, I propose to discuss the third category in detail.

Verbum Mentis Augustine discusses verbum mentis in detail in his extensive tractate De Trinitate, where verbum is a key concept of human cognition. In the previous discussion on the origin and transmission of meaning we identified several trends in Augustine, namely, that meaning is of a non-corporeal nature; no one can be taught by means of words, only reminded or urged to discover their meaning. We also found out that such a position is in large measure determined by Augustine’s criticism of the Stoic theory of signs as material entities. All these trends bear significance on his notion of verbum mentis. This notion is close to what Augustine would call pre­ speech, or thought formation. However, thought formation, in Augustine, is understood broadly as symbol making, as the creative act of a human being. It is “a ‘solid’ product of our interior activity in thinking, whose production we can reflect upon in the process of acquiring knowledge”75. Augustine emphasizes the importance of verbum mentis in the process of knowing, be it the knowledge of things, or of oneself, or of God. All knowledge is concentrated in verbum mentis as the formative power of thought and inward speech. Thus, Augustine says,

What is this thing capable of form but still unformed, but a process in our mind, darting hither and thither with a kind of movement of passage, as we turn our thought from one object to another in the course of discovery or presentation? It becomes a true word, only when what I have called darting movement of passage comes upon what we know and takes form from it, receiving its likeness at every point; so that the mode of thought

72 De Magistro v. 12 73 Ibid. vii.20 74D rix .l5 .1 0 75 Ibid. ix.7, 12 61

correspond to the mode of knowledge; and its object be spoken in the heart without voice, uttered or imagined, such as must belong to a particular language76. One ought also to consider a similar passage,

...this word exists before any sound...For in this state the word has the closest likeness to the thing known, of which it is offspring and image; from the vision which is knowledge arises a vision which is thought, a word of no language, a true word bom of a true thing, having nothing of its own but all from that knowledge of which it is bom77. These passages from De Trinitate reveal a very interesting picture. On the one hand, verbum mentis is identified with the knowledge of things enveloped in uttered words when it possesses the form of a thought. Elsewhere, for instance, Augustine points out, “This ‘word’ is unique in each instance and has no synonyms. It represents the mind’s encounter with the object of its experience”78. The “word” is of such importance for Augustine precisely because in this “word” the knowledge of things is bom, and from this very “word” we communicate ourselves. Consider the following passage:

The ‘word’— a truthful knowledge of things within, begotten by an inward speech, and remaining with us after its birth. When we communicate our thought, this mental ‘word’ is transferred to the mind of the hearer, but not itself, but its content. We speak [utter the signs] only out of this ‘word’ within. Unless we have it in the mind, we can’t speak [utter] it. The word shares the nature of love with the changeless truth. The word and the mind are united by love79.

Even as our word is made utterance yet not changed into utterance, so the Word of God was made flesh, but most assuredly not changed into flesh. Our word is made utterance, the divine Word flesh, by an assumption of the outward form, and not by a consumption of itself and a passing into the other80 What Augustine underlines in these passages, is the fundamental character of “word” to actualize the inner speech, i.e. the thought of a human being in communication with others. In the postlapsarian world, where not only truth is hidden from the immediate perception of mens, but also intercommunication has to be mediated through language and other means of communication, the notion of verbum mentis is a crucial concept of transcendence of all signification. Elsewhere, he speaks of verbum mentis as having an integral meaning, or a totality of meaning that transcends temporality. On the other hand, the knowledge possessed in the inner man is close to the notion of truth, and as such is indicative of the knowledge of things as vestiges of the Creator, or rather— of the intelligible relationships between things. As R.A. Markus

76 Ibid. xv.25.15 77 DT xv.22 78 Ibid. xiv.24 79 Ibid. ix.12.7, 13.8 80 Ibid. xv.20 62

o 1 suggests, the nature of verbum mentis is outside its actualized form . It presents to the mind what it means, what is essential of the thing known. By contrast, verbum vocis is meaningful only to the interpreter who knows the convention of its use. In De Trinitate XV Augustine proposes another feature of verbum mentis that makes it a valuable tool of human epistemology, namely, “We can reach God in our inward vision and inward utterance of the ‘word’ (emphasis added), which has a certain likeness to God”82. As an object of thought, the knowledge of God can be reached through inner reflection upon verbum mentis, which in turn brings the reality of the object, i.e. its meaning to light in the inward vision of mens83. In fact, Augustine goes even further and establishes a connection between verbum mentis and the Incarnate Word of God, second person of the Trinity, supreme Wisdom of God. Verbum mentis is of non-corporeal nature, and thus is the true word of mens. It transcends the temporality of uttered words, and possesses a certain unity of being.

there is a ‘word’ that belongs to no tongue, to none (that is) of the ‘tongues of the peoples’,...Any man that can understand this unspoken word, can see through this mirror and in this enigma a certain likeness of that Word of which it is written: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God’. When we speak the truth, that is say what we know, there must be bom out of knowledge held in our memory a word which corresponds in all respects to the knowledge of which it is bom. The thought which has received form from the object of our knowledge is the word spoken in our heart— a word that is neither Greek nor Latin nor of any other tongue. Only when we need to convey it to the knowledge of those to whom we speak, do we employ some token by which to signify it84. Augustine finds it necessary to highlight that during communication, what is passed from one mind to another is conception, or thought (meaning). The thought itself is not converted into the uttered word; it remains in the mind, and is not subject to change. It is a crucial point in Augustine, as he does not want to ruin the analogy of the “word” with the knowledge in our mind that comes from God, and therefore has an eternal character. In the endnotes to De dialectica, Darrell Jackson asks a very important question, namely, whether “Augustine believes that prior to and independent of speaking there is something in the mind which may be expressed by speech and which in turn is understood when one hears intelligible speech. This would not seem to be merely a thought or an idea in the psychological sense of those

81 Markus, R.A. “St. Augustine on Signs.” In Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, op. cit. P. 80 82 DT xv.24 83 See ibid. ix.7.12 84 Ibid. xv.19.10, see ibid.xv.20.11 on proper ‘word’ 63 terms, but Augustine does not tell us how it is related to thought”85. Augustine’s use of verbum mentis is not always clear. As an image of Verbum, the Incarnate Christ, it cannot be reduced to a notion of the concept. Augustine talks of the heart of a human being as being expressed in the enigma of the unspoken word, which is indicative of the image and likeness-character of mens, not merely as a rational being, but as a creature of God that possesses a gift of life and love. I suggest the use of verbum mentis as a moral category of human cognition on the way toward becoming a true image of God. Augustine numerously emphasizes the ethical significance of the “word,” as being born out of love and perfect knowledge86. Love and perfect knowledge are the necessary conditions of verbum mentis. Consequently, verbum mentis has an expansive, spiritual character bearing upon the totality of human lives. Heretofore, we can conclude that the notion of the “word” is central in Augustine’s theory of signification. The “word” is a mental and spiritual entity, which has an ethical dimension, and is preserved in the mind in the form of thought. The “word” is the closest likeness to the eternal Word of God; and it is in the “word” that the mind encounters things known, and comes to understand things unknown and of itself. It is also a category of the discernment of truth inherent in mens from the moment of creation.

Augustine’s theory of signification has an element of originality, when he introduces a triadic relationship of a sign-thing-speaker, or an interpreting mind. This new approach to the problem of signification has introduced epistemology as such. The question of the connection between a sign, a thing, and the mind that either interprets the meaning of words or things, or establishes the connection between the two is central in Augustine’s epistemology and the problem of the origin of meaning. By establishing such a connection, Augustine pinpointed a crucial problem, namely, how a sign, or a word is attributed to a particular thing, and how its meaning reflects the nature of things. Moreover, another question that arises from the first one: how words form a system of signs which establishes a pattern of thinking in virtue of which we operate linguistically and ontologically in this world. However, Augustine

85 De dialectica. Translated by B.D. Jackson; edited by Jan Pinborg. Dordrecht-Holland; Boston-USA: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1975. P. 127 86 See DTix.15 64 does not provide a solution to these riddles. He stresses the role of the Interior Teacher in interpretation and word-formation. Nonetheless, his failure in the field of linguistic rule does not undermine his achievements in the field of interpretation. His linguistic theory of signification helps him to develop an epistemological theory of reference with respect to the of the Scriptures, a theory of reference that allows him to account for how a human being stands in relation to the Scriptures, and to the Creator. In this respect there are two main points in Augustine’s theory of signification— the one concerns a purely linguistic semantic theory of the aforementioned triadic relationship; and the second one concerns the theory of reference of a human-being to the Scripture; the Scripture to the Creator; a human-being to the Creator and other human-beings; and the whole of creation to the Creator. Moreover, Scripture does not just connote a text for him with a linguistic meaning. Rather, the whole totality of man’s experience in the world is also a Scripture that can be studied and should be analyzed in view of the written text of the Word, bearing atemporal, non-linguistic eternal meaning. III. Theory of Interpretation as Theory of Reference

111.1. Reference as Basic Relationship in the Order of Being and Knowing In the previous Chapter, according to Mark Jordan’s suggestion we have distinguished between “linguistic rule” and the “rule of faith” as a condition and possibility of interpretation and knowledge of God. They signify not only the linguistic order, and thus the order of knowing, but the order of being as well. Further we borrowed Markus’s term of “theory of reference” in conjunction with the order of being. Like in his theory of signification, where signs signify other signs, things and concepts, the theory of reference treats things as signs, which stand in a hierarchical relationship to each other climaxing in the Creator. This hierarchical relationship is an organizing principle in Augustine’s ontology of becoming. It is very important to keep the theory of signification in mind, as the ontological order of things in their relationship to each other and to the Creator bears similarity with the order in which language unfolds in temporality, as both are characterized by order and harmony. Augustine calls this order rational, thus emphasizing that, though each thing possesses its place in the universe, things and signs are capable of transcending their physical boundaries and signify more than they are. What they signify, or strive to signify, and thus possess, is meaning, which, in Augustine, determines the level of their existence. If words are corporeal signs that signify the eternal in things, namely meaning, or the place things occupy in the hierarchy of being, then things also possess the same feature attributed to them by God at the moment of creation. What they signify at their deepest is the totality of meaning, or the Creator/creation relationship. Interpretation of this totality of meaning is constitutive of the process by which the human mind becomes an image of God. In De doctrina Christiana Augustine says, It is, then, a miserable kind of spiritual slavery to interpret signs as things, and to be incapable of raising the mind’s eye above the physical creation so as to absorb the eternal light1. In this passage Augustine emphasizes that things are used as signs to interpret God’s will as expressed in the underlying meaning of the created order. Augustine uses the notion of “word” in the sense of a moral entity that discerns. As such it provides him an apt example of the inferential character of all

1 DDC iii.21 2 See DT xv.19 66 signs qua vestiges of the Creator. The essence of the “word,” in Augustine, lies in its character as judgment. We might understand it as a constitutive part of the creation, charged with eternal meaning, involving the judgment between good and evil. This order is based on the principle of harmony—the basic ultimate principle of existence in Augustine3. As Eugene Vance points out,

Verbal signs...manifest an order that is rational and that, though it is manifested in words as material things, transcends their materiality and becomes, thereby, pleasing to the soul4. Poetry is one of the examples of such a manifestation. Though unfolding in time, it manifests an eternal harmonious order of the creation, which I call a spiritual order, and which I define as the presence of the divinely constituted meaning in the creation. This order is based on harmony and love, and can be observed by mind alone as an interpreting agent. Harmony, in its turn, is an image of unity capable of bringing the soul closer to the enjoyment of eternity. In this Chapter I argued that Augustine develops his theory of reference from out of his theory of signification. His notion of the word exhibits this development. Though it is a material entity on the level of expression, it has a transcendent root in the light of which the human mind can transcend temporality, and reach the knowledge of God, which Augustine argues is possible only “by inference however remote from this likeness in an enigma, in the memory and understanding of our human mind”5. In other words, language is but a determinate entity used as root-sign to denote the universe as a whole6. Another fundamental argument that marks this Chapter regards Augustine’s use of allegory as the basis of all signification. Margaret Ferguson proposes that Augustine understood the present as literally absent. She suggests on the basis of Augustine’s account of time (Conf. XI. 15) that present has no extension, in him, as it is immediate and cannot be measured. Present does not occupy any space, as space presupposes sequence. Thus, says M. Ferguson, present is literally absent. “[Human] language is essentially inadequate because the concept of presence entails a notion of meaning as the immediate unveiling of a totality.”7 Further she adds, “Augustine is...defining all language as figurative because it is incapable of grasping the literal

3 See Ibid. iv.2.4 4 Vance, Eugene, op. cit. P. 29 5 DT xv.40 6 See the definition of the root metaphor on P. 44 7 Ferguson, Margaret W. op. cit. P. 844 67 truth of God’s nature as pure presence”8. In other words, God’s presence to the world cannot be grasped by the transient means of the temporal world. In the world where there is an essential gap between the Creator and the fallen creation, creatures are inadequate means for His signification. However, as His creation, they intrinsically contain traces of the one that caused them into being. We have also looked at these things with an eye to their figurative meaning (emphasis added), which Thou didst intend, either in the order of their coming into being, or in the order in which they were written9. Thus, Augustine conceives all of creation as a vestige of the Creator that signifies the hidden, or obscure meaning of God’s presence to the world, or, in other words, reveals the ways of God’s involvement in the creation. To follow Ferguson’s analogy, the meaning of true speech is always figurative in the fallen condition of mens, and is thus absent. The only thing that is present to mens is the physical actualization of that meaning in words and other non-verbal signs. Therefore, as Augustine numerously points out, human beings should seek true meaning, that is always figurative, or spiritual in nature. In De doctrina Christiana Augustine teaches his students an art of interpretation, So Christian freedom has liberated those whom it found enslaved to useful signs...and by interpreting the signs to which they were subjected has raised them to the level of the things of which these were signs. [They] no longer live in slavery, even to useful signs, but rather exercise their minds by the discipline of understanding them spiritually (emphasis added). Someone who attends to and worships a thing which is meaningful but remains unaware of its meaning is a slave to a sign10. In this passage Augustine’s “signs” stand for the Liberal Arts (see the discussion in Chapter Two). In another account of interpretation he says, Following the usual curriculum I had already come across a book by a certain Cicero, whose language (but not his heart) almost everyone admires...The book changed my feelings. It altered my prayers, Lord, to be towards you yourself. It gave me different values and priorities. Suddenly even vain hope became empty to me, and I longed for the immortality of wisdom and with an incredible ardor in my heart began to rise up to return to you. For I did not read the book for a sharpening of my style..., I was impressed not by the book’s refining effect on my style and literary expression but by the content11. Thus, one must look beyond signs to things signified, and beyond them to their meaning as vestiges of the Creator. Meaning is not obvious; it needs to be interpreted.

8 Ferguson, Margaret W. op. cit. P. 853 9 Conf. xiii.34.49 10 DDC iii.29 11 Conf. iii.4.7 68 Meaning is immediate, while the fallen creation is part of the temporary order. Thus only mens can grasp the totality of meaning, and even so not in its entirety, but in an enigma, or in an allegory of the inner word (see the discussion on verbum mentis above).

Linguistic Meaning of Signs and Ontological Meaning of Things Augustine defines allegory, or figurative meaning as meaning, “which Thou didst intend, either in the order of their coming into being, or in the order in which they were written”12. This is a crucial passage for the argument I am about to present. Augustine does not distinguish between the linguistic meaning of signs and the ontological meaning of things. He believes there is one true meaning, the one intended by God at the moment of creation, and what language as a system of significant signs, and the creation as a vestige of the Creator strive to signify is that ultimate meaning inherent in things in the act of creation (see Chapter Two and Four). Thus, Augustine views creation as a narrative unfolding in time, an over-flowing plenitude of meaning of spiritual life. He does not develop this thought to the same extent as he develops the idea of the inferential relationship of things to the Creator. The theme of creation as a narrative was later developed by his followers in the twelfth and thirteenth century, and evolved into a genre of commentary based on textual symbolism13.

Transformational Power of Allegories The spiritual meaning understood by mens serves Augustine’s purpose of becoming, and as such is an important theme. Ability to interpret things figuratively determines spiritual change in the soul, and thus its transformation. In the Confessions Augustine describes the time when he, as a young man, was listening to Ambrose’s preaching, seeking the “truth”— certitude of knowledge well argued.

Nevertheless together with the words which I was enjoying, the subject matter, in which I was unconcerned, came to make an entry into my mind. I could not separate them. While I opened my heart in noting the eloquence with which he spoke, there also entered no less the truth which he affirmed, though only gradually...Above all, I heard first one, then another, then many difficult passages in the Old Testament scriptures figuratively interpreted (emphasis added), where I, by taking them literally, had found them to kill. So after several passages in the Old Testament had been expounded spiritually (emphasis added) I now found fault with that despair of mine, caused by my belief that

12 Conf. xiii.34.49 13 See “The Symbolist Mentality.” In Chenu, Marie-Dominique. Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century; edited and translated by Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Pp. 99-145 69

the law and the prophets could not be defended at all against the mockery of hostile critics14. Ambrose did not argue, he expressed truth in allegories, and that way it penetrated into the young and eager to learn Augustine, changing his inner being. In the quoted passage Augustine uses the theme of heart as a channel of true knowledge and self- expression. E. Sweenley points out that,

The things of this world are signs we may fail to interpret correctly, and even our own acts toward these signs are themselves signs which may only ambiguously reflect our character and our acts15. The author underlines the fact that, at the base of understanding lies human will and desire to know truth. Therefore the entire human being is involved in the act of understanding. And that is what Augustine would call the judgment character of mens, i.e. when truth is heard, it is recognized by the mind, and starts operating within, causing the soul to seek its possession. The same author, i.e. Sweenley, suggests faith and charity as fundamental faculties of human understanding in Augustine16.

Allegory According to St. Augustine As already argued above, meaning is inherent in things and is figurative for human understanding. Thus Augustine introduces the terms “allegory,” “metaphor,” “enigma” to characterize the figurative or spiritual meaning of the creation as it stands in referential relation to the Creator. As has been previously pointed out, in the Confessions Augustine does not distinguish between the meaning of things qua ontological entities, and language qua system of significant signs. He says,

We have also looked at these things with an eye to their figurative meaning, which Thou didst intend, either in the order of their coming into being (emphasis added), or in the order in which they were written (emphasis added)17. Allegory, according to this quote is characteristic not only of language, but of the creation as well. Augustine believes that by observing the creation, and learning to see the signs of God’s presence in it, the human being acquires knowledge of God, which is characterized in Augustine as enigma, i.e. by analogy with the knowledge of the creation. Thus, the acquired knowledge does not provide direct access to the vision of God, but an analogy between the Creator and the creation, expressed in Augustine’s

14 Conf v. 14.24 15 E.C. Sweenley. “Hugh of St. Victor: The Augustinian Tradition of Sacred and Secular Reading Revised.” In Reading and Wisdom: The De Doctrina Christiana of St. Augustine in the Middle Ages; edited by Edward D. English. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. P. 72 16 Ibid. P. 67 17 Conf. xiii.34.49 70 negative theology, i.e. God is not what creation is, therefore, by way of negation we can come closer to the knowledge of God. On the other hand, Augustine realizes the limits of such an approach, and acknowledges that there can be no conclusive knowledge of God in the present condition of humanity. That is why he is stressing the importance of the rule of faith as basis of interpretation and understanding. Faith, he says, is in things unseen, and in the authority of the Scriptures,

Authority demands belief and prepares man for reason. Reason leads to understanding and knowledge.. .the highest authority belongs to truth when it is clearly known18. Before proceeding with the rule of faith, it is important to emphasize the non­ differentiated use of analogical and allegorical relationships in Augustine. Based on his theory of signification he identifies allegory with the rule of faith, or interpretation of signs as things “not to be taken in the letter, but...to be understood in a figure”19, i.e. not significant of things, but of the meaning intended for them by God. Thus, when we discuss allegorical, or spiritual interpretation in Augustine, we should understand him to say that true interpretation involves knowledge of the analogical relationship between the creation and the truth it strives to present to the human understanding—the only true image of God that possesses the eye of reason for the truth of God.

III.2. Signification in the Creation by Obscuring the Truth. Allegorical Relation Between Things as Signs— Vestiges of the Creator, and the Truth they Reveal to Human Understanding

Types of Allegory In De dialéctica Augustine distinguishes nine uses of the allegorical sense: (1) by similarity one name is used for many things; (2) part from a whole; (3) whole from a part; (4) the species from a genus; (5) the genus from the species; (6) effect from the cause; (7) the cause from the effect; (8) what is contained from the container; (9) vice versa 20 . All of them are based on the principle of similarity, or similitude, which penetrates all levels of discourse. While describing the atemporal meaning of the Scriptures, Augustine makes an interesting point,

it teaches partly quite openly and partly by similitudes in word, deed and sacrament, it is adapted to the complete instruction and exercise of the soul...if there were no sacraments in Scripture, and if they were not signs and tokens of truth, action would not be properly related to knowledge...Many things which were imposed upon the Hebrew

18 DVR xxiv.45 19 DUC 5 20 DD 10.19 71

people, i.e., a multitude bound by Law under the same God, are no longer observed in practice, but they remained valid for faith and are susceptible of (allegorical) interpretation. They do not now bind in servile bonds, but they afford the mind exercise in its freedom21. As we can see, Augustine accepts the fact that allegory lies at the basis of signifying spiritual meaning, and that the Scripture is a sign of eternal meaning in temporality. Thus he blurs the distinction between the written text of the Bible and the creation as vestige and indicator of God’s truth and will. Both are spoken into existence, the latter by the very creative act of God through His Son, the Word co-eternal with the Father, while the former—through human beings, faithful servants of God on earth. While recognizing the importance of allegory for interpretation in general, he is concerned with the problem, similar to the one of the origin of meaning, namely—how we can know the only true meaning, when we exist in the mode of temporality and language, which are not like eternity. Can we reach true understanding, and if so how much of it can our language convey. He asks these fundamental questions in his work De uera religione:

what is the mode of interpreting allegory, believed to have been spoken in wisdom through the Holy Spirit; whether it is enough to allegorize things that have been seen in ancient day, and in more recent times, or is it to be applied to the affections and nature of the soul, and to unchangeable eternity...What is the difference between allegorizing history and allegorizing facts or speeches or sacraments? How is the diction of the divine Scripture to be received according to the idiom of various languages?...Or do they signify intelligible and spiritual powers, as do such words in Scripture as helmet,...Above all we must ask how it profits the human race that the divine providence has spoken to us by human rational and corporeal creatures who have been the servants of God22. Here Augustine is first of all trying to draw a distinction between linguistic and extra- linguistic meaning, as well as linguistic and non-linguistic modes of human existence. Furthermore, he is raising a very important question, i.e. if the written text of the Scripture, which describes a culture so distant from us in time (not to mention the incomprehensible beginning of times and creaturely existence) is all we have, how can we be sure that we would ever be able to distinguish between the intentions of the authors who put the Scriptures in writing; the allegories, or idioms of the ancient Hebrew culture and their language; and the unbridgeable historical and linguistic gap that exists between us? Most importantly, how can we be sure that language is capable of sustaining the truth of God at all? Augustine addresses these issues in stages.

21 DVR xvi.33 72 111.3. Rule of Faith

Obscurity as Means of True Interpretation First of all, he introduces the rule of faith and reasoning as the principle of all interpretation. It signifies not only the narrative and divinely instituted meaning in the universe, but also the reader’s response as a condition and possibility of right interpretation, which, for Augustine, is a sign of human becoming an image of God. Moreover, he believes that God purposefully obscures truth in allegories, so that the creative acts of humans may be manifested in the process, opening room for deeper understanding of true meaning. Augustine at times suggests that allegories are but tokens by means of which the human mind transcends temporality, and participates in eternity, where meaning is in abundance and never ceases to be. That is the realm of the everlasting Word, the only true Teacher who “answers without obscurity and.. .indicates without obscurity, He does not abandon those who seek information” . In the beginning of the Confessions he suggests a metaphor of the soul as the container of God’s truth: “The house of my soul is too small for you to come to it. May it be enlarged by you”24. He talks of human soul as container of sinful desires and temptations; and only spiritual understanding can rid the soul of them, letting forgetfulness of the sinful nature take place within, replacing it with the narrative of one’s life modelled according to God’s will for every particular individual and the community as a whole. In the same book of the Confessions he meditates on the claim that God fills every creature with eternal meaning, Do heaven and earth contain you because you have filled them? or do you fill them and overflow them because they do not contain you? Where do you put the overflow of yourself after heaven and earth are filled? Or have you, who contain all things, no need to be contained by anything because what you will you fill by containing it?.. .When you are ‘poured out’ upon us, you are not wasted on the ground. You raise us upright. You are not scattered but reassemble us. In filling all things, you fill them all with the whole of yourself25. Therefore, the purpose of forgetting one’s sins and of understanding the spiritual meaning behind the creation is directed toward the restoration of brokenness caused by the Fall, and toward the human mind’s embrace of truth as a whole, thus, bringing the soul to unity. In the corporeal world, however, truth is enveloped in obscurities, which blind

22 DVR 1.99 23 Sermo 265:5 24 Conf. i.5.6 25 Ibid. i.3.3 73 the soul, if the latter does not seek eternal meaning in created things. On the one hand, obscurity is an inevitable result of the corporeal universe, which cannot contain truth as a whole, but only in an enigma, or as Augustine says, “through the veil of flesh”26. On the other hand, God purposefully envelops the truth in order to humble humans and subordinate them to the authority of His word, which demands belief and charity: “May we see, O Lord, the ‘heavens, the works of Thy fingers’; clear away from our eyes the cloud by which Thou hast enveloped them”27. In book XII of the Confessions he emphasizes the importance of complete subordination to the truth, quoting the famous passage from Matthew 22.37-39,

Let us ‘love the Lord our God with out whole heart, and our whole soul, and with our whole mind, and our neighbour as ourselves’28. Augustine believes that such a direction of one’s heart, soul, and mind may bring a human being to the confession of one’s sins, and therefore to their forgetfulness, and to the faith of God, which, according to Augustine, is a condition and possibility of true understanding through revelation.

And yet thus far ‘by faith,’ not yet ‘by sight.’ ‘For in hope were we saved. But hope that is seen is not hope.’ Still does ‘the deep call on the deep,’ but now ‘in the voice of Thy flood-gates.’ Yet, even he who says: ‘I could not speak to you as to spiritual but only as to carnal man,’ even he does not yet think that he himself has laid hold of it, but ‘forgetting what is behind,’ he presses on to those things which are ahead, and he sighs under his burden, and his ‘soul thirsts for the living God,’ ‘as the hart pants for the fountains of water’— and he says: ‘When shall I reach it?’ ‘Yearning to be clothed with that dwelling of his which is from Heaven,’ he calls to the lower deep and says: ‘Be not conformed to this world but be transformed in the newness of your mind’.. .But now no longer in his own voice, but in Thine, who has sent Thy Spirit from on high through Him who ascended on high and opened up the ‘flood-gates’ of His gifts, so that the stream of the river might make Thy City joyful29. The “flood-gates” that Augustine is talking about in this passage is the pouring forth of the truth of God, that, when apprehended by the soul, transforms the temporality of human being into expectation of life everlasting in the world to come (expressed in the practice of the signs of eternity in the community of believers on earth). Later we will see that community plays a crucial role in Augustine’s theme of interpretation, as it provides the of faith for the interpretation of ambiguities.

Objectivity of Truth Augustine’s main concern is that meaning is enveloped in language, which

26Conf. xiii.15.18 27 Ibid. xiii.15.17 28 Ibid. xii.25.35 29 Ibid. xiii.13.14; also see ibid. xiii.15.17 74 itself is an ambiguous sign. However, he does allow a possibility for truth to be contained in language for those that truly desire to know and seek charity, not as certainty of knowledge expressed in well argued , but as way of righteous living. Being a young fellow Augustine was a proud person who wanted proof and clarity of verbal argumentation in order to be convinced by the validity of verbal propositions. Later, looking back at his disbelief of the Catholic doctrine that lacked precision, and eloquence of interpretation, he notes the following:

Being ignorant what your image consisted of, I should have knocked and inquired about the meaning of this belief, and not insulted and opposed it, as if the belief meant what I thought (emphasis added)...Deceived with promises of certainty, with childish error and rashness had mindlessly repeated many uncertain things as if they were certain30. Here as elsewhere Augustine repeats his claim that, truth lies beyond the human mind, enveloped in language, which is the only means of acquiring and transmitting knowledge in human society after the Fall. Moreover, truth needs to be sought through the “veil of flesh” and language in order to reach human understanding. Truth is not born in mens, but is capable of dwelling within once understood: “But, if they love it for this reason, that it is true, then it becomes both theirs and mine, since it is common for all lovers of truth”31.

Intention of the Writer and Spiritual Understanding. Interpretation as an Art of Discernment We return to the question of allegory as characteristic of the intention of the writer, or alternatively as the convention of the ancient culture and language. We juxtapose allegorical intention with the true meaning intended by God for human understanding. Augustine suggests that what matters is the truth of the spirit, and thus continuing with literal interpretation needs to be sacrificed for the sake of spiritual, i.e. true understanding of the Scripture. In the Confessions Augustine says,

while every person strives to perceive the meaning in the holy Scriptures which the writer put there, how is it wrong if one perceives the meaning which Thou, O Light of all truthful minds, does show to be true— even though the author whom he reads does not grasp the same meaning, yet is perceiving a true meaning but not this one?...If some other man saw another interpretation in the light of the Truth, this meaning would not fail to be discoverable in these same words32.

30 Conf. vi.4.5 31 Ibid. xii.25.34 32 Ibid. xii. 18.27; 26.36 75 This is another example of his belief that truth does not lie in words, but in reality, and in the inner man where Truth itself advises the human mens, revealing the meaning of things intended for them by God. Later in the Confessions Augustine suggests another view, grounded in a difference in nature. The principle of eternity is the unity of being while the corporeal world is based on the principle of multiplicity and diversity. Consequently, true meaning, which is eternal and one can be expressed in many ways in temporality.

I know that what is understood in but one way by the mind may be expressed in many ways through the body, and, what is expressed in but one way through the body may be understood in many ways by the mind. Notice the simple love of God and neighbor— by how great a multiplicity and symbols and by what innumerable tongues, and in each language by countless ways of speaking, it is proclaimed corporeally...I take it that, in this blessing the ability and the power has been granted us by Thee, both to express in many ways what we hold as understood in but one way, and to understand in many ways what we read as obscurely expressed in but one way33. What I see Augustine saying is not that there exists a multiplicity of true interpretations, although that is the way he expresses his thought, but rather that true interpretation is an art of discernment between three levels of discourse (see the discussion on P. 43), or that true interpretation should be a system of discerning between signs and things in the hierarchy of being, which as we have argued earlier is itself a sign of God, the only supreme Thing in that hierarchy. Thus in De doctrina Christiana he says,

In the same way other things signify not one thing but more, and not only two diverse things, but sometimes many different things in accordance with the meaning of passages in which they are found34. Augustine is saying that, every thing can signify on three levels of discourse, and it is mens that discerns its significance. The power to discern and interpret things as they are in relation to the Creator is an expression of the image and likeness-character of the human being, who is an intelligent and moral creature of God.

Scripture as the Firmament of Authority and Narrative of the Journey to God. Interpretation of Scripture as Primary Task of the Rule of Faith Scripture plays a central role in Augustine’s philosophy of becoming. There are several trends of thought in Augustine on this topic. First of all, Scripture is an inspired word of God for the community of believers, and as such is a firmament of authority for anyone who is seeking truth. In the Confessions Augustine describes it as

33 Conf. xiii.24.36, 37 34 DDC iii.xxv.37 76 follows, Or, who but Thee, our God, hast made for us a firmament of authority, over us, in Thy divine Scripture? For ‘the heavens shall be folded together as a book...Thy divine Scripture is of more sublime authority, now that those mortals, through whom Thou didst dispense it to us, have suffered an earthly death...Thou hast stretched out the firmament of Thy Book like a skin, Thy wonderfully harmonious words (emphasis added) which Thou has imposed upon us through the instrumentality of mortal men35. Augustine emphasizes in this passage the role of Scripture as sign of God’s involvement in the life of the creation, where the Scriptures is a mediator of His will and an exemplar of the Creator/creation relationship. The Scripture is a product of temporality and of the pen of mortal humans, but the meaning it is charged with is the atemporal meaning of eternity significant of the Creator/creation relationship. And that is precisely where the Scripture possesses a character of a valid authority for humans; it narrates the story of the covenantal relationship between God and Israel, His chosen people, and the whole humanity— with the coming of Christ36. The Scripture is a firmament, which stretches as a protective scroll over the Christian community. The Scripture is, in Augustine, the scroll extended in time that will be folded up at the end of days37. In the Confessions Augustine suggests that the Scripture is a narrative that is always present to human perception in virtue of being a similitude of the Verbum, Their [angels’] book [i.e., Verbum] is never closed, nor is their scroll rolled up, for Thou Thyself art this for them and art so eternally, because Thou hast arranged them above this firmament which Thou hast made form above the infirmity of the members of a lower society, where they may look up and learn of Thy mercy which proclaims Thee in time, Thee who has made times38. It seems that Augustine alludes to the Scripture, which, according to him, is not of the past. But if understood spiritually, tells the story of a life journey to God. Each individual, accordingly, should undertake this journey in order to reach the perfect knowledge of God, and consequently happiness. Moreover, the Scripture is the written word of God, charged with eternal meaning. As God’s word it enveils and reveals truth to human understanding when interpreted— mapped onto one’s own life. Scripture is both a written sign that signifies a linguistic rule, and a sign of the rule of faith. As composed of verbal signs, its grammar is capable of revealing the truth of obscure passages, like for instance, when the plural of the phrase “Let us

35 Conf. xiii.15.16 36 Ibid. viii.8.20, xiii.14.15 37 See ibid. xiii.15.18 38 Ibid. xiii.15.18. See DFR 4.7 77 make” and “to our image” in Genesis, reveals that a human being has been created to the image of the Trinity; whereas the singular of another phrase “to the image of God” signifies that “man is ‘renewed unto the knowledge of God, according to the image of his Creator,’ and becoming ‘the spiritual man judges all things’... ’and he himself is judged by no man’”39.

Faith as Mode of Knowing While the grammar of the Scriptures can illumine some opaque passages, its overall message can only be known by faith. As quoted earlier from De uera religione XXIV.45, faith prepares mens for understanding, which involves the whole human being. As Augustine says in the Confessions,

something neither open to the proud nor laid bare to mere children; a text lowly to the beginner but, on further reading, of mountainous difficulty and enveloped in mysteries...Yet the Bible is composed in such a way that as beginners mature, its meaning grows with them (emphasis added)40. The narrative of the Scripture is not a story told of the past, or a fiction of the narrator, it is a locus of the Light, an image that mediates to God, a mode of human existence in the corporeal world. Augustine perceives it as a metaphor of paradise on earth:

We should not yet think of the man who was made into a living soul as spiritual, but as still animal. For he was made spiritual, when he was established in paradise, that is, in the happy life, and received the commandment of perfection so that he might then be made perfect by the word of God (emphasis added)41. The fact that we exist does not mean that we possess proper being. Humanity has fallen, and as a result, has lost its perfection. Augustine strongly believes that every human being needs redemption through the word, which is the book of the Scripture. In the next Chapter we will return to this passage when we discuss the redemption of human speech as becoming a true image of God.

The Language of the Scripture and its Role: Conversion of the Unbelievers, Spreading the Word to the People, Practicing the Rule of Faith Interpretation always involves two processes in Augustine, best described in the Confessions,

But when shall I be capable of proclaiming by ‘the tongue of my pen’ all your exhortations and all your terrors and consolations and directives, by which you brought me to preach your word and dispense your sacrament to your people? And if I have the capacity to proclaim this in an ordered narrative, yet the drops of time are too precious to me. For a long time past I have been burning to meditate in your law and confess to you

39 Conf. xiii.22.32 40 Ibid. iii.5.9 41 DGadM ii.8.10 78

what I know of it and what lies beyond my powers— the first elements granted by your illumination and the remaining areas of darkness in my understanding— until weakness is swallowed up by strength42. On the one hand, interpretation is an internal process of self-recollection, with three stages of development, i.e. (1) concentration of attention on the inner process of the discovery of truth closely connected with the notion of “inner speech” and verbum mentis, the truth spoken within; (2) invocation of passages of the Scripture for the purpose of directing meditative practice, the aim of which is to recall the sinful past and place oneself in a biblical narrative, so that truth about one’s own life can be revealed through the written word of God; and (3) return to God by way of confessing the truth discovered, and by way of discipline, i.e. bringing one’s life in accord with the truth discovered. In this way, Scripture serves as a guide toward true interpretation of one’s life as a way of becoming a true image of God. Moreover, silent reading, or reading in the inner man (learned by Augustine from Ambrose) provides intellectual/spiritual nourishment and a possibility for truth to be revealed to human understanding (see the discussion on silence in Chapter Four). However, as Augustine notes, it is not a practice of mental abstraction, but of intuitive thinking, the purpose of which is to serve the Christian community in a better way. Internal interpretation always serves the purpose of external preaching in Augustine. As he further says in the Confessions,

May your scriptures be my pure delight, so that I am not deceived in them and do not lead others astray in interpreting them43. Augustine sees interpretation of the Scriptures as a communal responsibility. As argued earlier in Chapter Two, in order for meaning to take place, it needs to be brought to expression, i.e. externalized in speech. According to R.A. Markus, meaning is always relational, i.e. it means something to someone. Likewise, the Scripture carries a particular message for humans, which once understood, becomes evident in the way of life of the community. In fact, the two practices cannot be separated, i.e. hermeneutic exercise presupposes an assent to the discovered truth, expressed in the transformation of personal life and communal practices. Indeed, Mark Jordan suggests an interesting parallel between Augustine’s view of Scripture and the faithful community,

Scriptural exegesis is thoroughly subordinated to the way-of-life found in the faithful community because the way-of-life embodies the intention behind the Scriptural signs44.

42 Conf. xi.2.2 43 Ibid. xi.2.3 79 A faithful community, i.e. the one that practises the righteous way of life preached in the Scripture, provides a norm of faith for the interpretation of Scriptural signs, especially Scriptural ambiguities. The way of life practised in such a community reveals their meaning, and as Augustine emphasizes in the Confessions, makes them a powerful tool in the conversion of unbelievers.

through Thy word, not the depths of the sea, but the earth separated from the bitterness of the waters, produced... ’a living soul.’.. .For, there is no other way of entering into the kingdom of heaven, from the moment that Thou hast established it as the means of entrance. Nor does it seek great and marvelous things by which faith may come to be. For it does not refuse to believe unless it see ‘signs and wonders, since the faithful earth is already separated from the waters of the sea which are bitter in infidelity— and ‘tongues are as signs, not to believers, but to unbelievers’45. This passage supports the view that the faithful community manifests the intention behind biblical signs, and provides a guideline—norm— for the interpretation of various ambiguities, revealing their true meaning. Augustine also points out that, once a way of life narrated in the Scripture becomes the way of life of a particular community, preaching is reserved only for conversion of unbelievers. Marcia Colish suggests in her book The M irror o f Language that, all interpretation in the Middle Ages was directed toward religious knowledge, and that “the human faculty of speech could now participate in the Incarnation by helping to spread the Word to the world. Medieval thinkers thus stressed verbal signs as the primary media of religious knowledge because they saw in Christ the Word, the mediator between God and man, whose redemption enabled them to know God and bear God to each other in human words, as well as because their habits of mind were derived from the verbal disciplines of the trivium”46. Augustine alludes to preaching as an important part of being an image of God.

Lights were made in the firmament of heaven, ‘holding fast the word of life.’ Run in every direction.. .’you are the light of the world,’ nor are you ‘under the measure.’ He, to whom you have held fast, has been exalted and He has exalted you. Run, and make it known to all nations47. Therefore, we can conclude that the dichotomy—internal interpretation, external preaching— serves two purposes in Augustine, i.e. hermeneutic exercise produces religious knowledge, which is necessarily manifested in the way of life of a religious community, which in turn provides the norm for understanding the practices

44 Jordan, Mark D. op. cit. P. 185 45 Conf. xii.21.29 46 Colish, Marcia, op. cit. P. ix. Colish refers to Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectic as disciplines of the trivium 80 narrated in the Scripture, thus revealing their meaning. Once the rule of faith is established among the faithful, the Scriptures produce linguistic means for the conversion of the unbelievers by spreading the word of God to the world, i.e. extending the firmament of Scriptural authority over the humankind.

47 Conf. xiii. 19.25 IV. Speech as Metaphor of Human Becoming

As mentioned in Chapter One, there are three notions in Augustine that form the core of his Christian philosophy, i.e. being, knowledge and love. In De civitate Dei Augustine states,

It is...without any delusive representation of images or phantasms that I am wholly certain that I exist (emphasis added), and that I know (emphasis added) this fact and love (emphasis added) it'. To go back to the argument of Chapter One, creation exists because it was caused into being by the One who supremely is. Beside existence, God confers certain meaning upon reality, which is indicative of the Creator/creation relationship, and is thus what the creation strives to express in essence. God also created a human being, who is His becoming— created in image and likeness to the Creator2. Human beings occupy a special status in the creation, as they possess the ability to be, to know and to love. While the creation exists and exhibits the intelligible character conferred upon it by God, a human being is capable of knowing its intelligible structure and enjoying its beauty. But as discussed in previous sections, the final goal of human knowledge is not the creation, but its Creator. Desire to know God, according to St. Augustine, is the only true desire of humans. The world exhibits His traces; its intelligible nature reveals His supreme nature. Still, the creation is not capable of containing God. Moreover, human beings, created in the image and likeness of God, cannot contain the truth of Him due to their fallen nature. After the Fall a human being abides in temporality and in a corporeal world of change. A human being himself has acquired a corporeal and mortal body. These factors make Augustine’s quest for God almost unfeasible. If a human being does not know God, and if nothing he knows is like God, how then can one lay hold of Him who is beyond and above the corporeal realm. And that is where the third notion, namely— love, comes into play. As Augustine says in De civitate Dei, although he is uncertain of the knowledge he possesses, he is certain of the fact that he exists, he knows this fact, and he loves it3. Among these three, love is the driving force by virtue of which a human being desires to know the Creator and strives toward His possession. In other words, it is due to

1 DCD xi.26 2 DVR xlvi.86 3 See Augustine’s famous argument on doubt as proof of existence on P. 30 82 love that a human being as imago Dei has a capacity for God (capax Dei), i.e. the capacity to imitate His creative acts. What are those acts then, and how does the human being imitate them?

IV. 1. Speech as Creative Act of God— Order of Being Augustine names speech as the creative act of God, by virtue of which He caused the world and the first human beings into existence, and through which He continues to sustain their being. However, speech is not a simple notion in Augustine. We need to be aware of its different uses. Speech is used in both a substantive and a relative sense4. Substantively speech is a spiritual movement in silence, i.e. itself beyond time and the physicality of this world. It appears from nothing (ex nihilo), and is an instantaneous act of God. In De genesi ad litteram Augustine describes an act of creation in terms of speaking,

We should also note that in the other cases God said, ‘Let there be made, and there was made,’ but here God said, ‘Let us make,’ since the Holy Spirit wanted to convey the excellence of human nature in this way also...the speaking was not separate from the making (emphasis added), but that both occurred together5. Another substantive use of “speech” is compared, in Augustine, with the voice of God that inspires the creation toward perfection, i.e. true being: “There, Lord, I hear your voice speaking to me, for one who teaches us speaks to us”6.

Speech as Creative Power of God—Christ, Second Person of the Trinity, Word of God by Whom Creation Came into Existence Speech is used relatively in Augustine to refer to the Christ, the second person of the Trinity, through whom creation came into existence. He is the true speech of God, and a Sign of His presence to the creation.

And so by the Word coetemal with yourself, you say all that you say in simultaneity and eternity, and whatever you say will come about does come about...Thus in the gospel the Word speaks through the flesh, and this sounded externally in human ears, so that it should be believed and sought inwardly, found in the eternal truth where the Master who alone is good teaches all his disciples.. .Who is our teacher except the reliable truth?7 In his Sermons, Augustine also emphasizes the role of Christ as true speech of God,

Nevertheless, they would later deny the Christ who has bom there, whom they did not seek at His birth, but whom they afterwards saw, they would kill Him, not as an infant, but later whey they had heard Him speak (emphasis added)8.

4 See D.W. Johnson’s substantive/relative distinction discussed on P. 6 5 DGadL 16.56 6 Ibid. xi.7.9 7 Conf. xi.7.9-8.10; also see DGadL 16.55, 56 8 Sermo 199:1 83 There are many examples in Augustine, which show his position on speech as the creative power of God. In the subsequent sections on the Incarnate Word and the speech/language distinction this theme of speech used relatively will return.

IV.2. Purpose of Existence, i.e. Meaning Inherent in the Creation— Order of Knowing For now we note that Augustine emphasizes that, creation possesses beside existence a certain purpose, i.e. meaning conferred upon it by God. As Joseph Mazzeo stresses, “God...creates the reality and its intrinsic meaning simultaneously.”9 He means that the meaning of things is conferred by God into their very being at the moment of creation.

since then through itself it is nothing, but whatever it is is from God, staying in its order, it is quickened in mind and conscience by the presence of God Himself. And so it has this good inmost (emphasis added)10. The purposive character of the creation’s existence presupposes a continuous relationship between the creation and the Creator, as only God possesses the fullness of knowledge, and thus only He can reveal the intrinsic meaning and purpose of existence, in which God’s will for the whole creation is realized. As discussed in Chapter Two a human being seeks the knowledge of God in two ways, i.e. through the signs of the creation which point to, or signify the intrinsic meaning of the Creator/creation relationship; and through self-knowledge, where a human being can hear the soundless speech of Christ, the Inner Teacher, who reveals to human understanding the purpose intended for him/her by God, and which can be known only if sought within. As Augustine notes in the Confessions, “Thou speakest in a loud voice in the interior ear of Thy servant”11. To get ahead of our discussion of the theme of becoming, I would like to state briefly the role of the knowledge of the intrinsic meaning for human acts. In De Genesi aduersus manichaeos, Augustine claims that, God’s revelation, i.e. truth spoken within the mens transforms human heart:

We should not yet think of the man who was made into a living soul as spiritual, but as still animal. For he was made spiritual, when he was established in paradise, that is, in

9 Mazzeo, Joseph Anthony. “St. Augustine’s Rhetoric of Silence.” In Journal of the History of Ideas 23 (1962). P. 180 10 De musica vi. 13.40 11 Conf xiii.29.44; also see Conf xii.l 1.11. Consider another passage from the Confessions: “even from that depth, I fell in love with Thee. I have gone astray, yet I have not forgotten Thee. I heard Thy voice behind my back, telling me to return” (Conf. xii.10.10) 84

the happy life, and received the commandment of perfection so that he might then be made perfect by the word of God (emphasis added)12 When revealed, God’s truth fills the entire human being13, resulting in understanding and transformation of one’s perception of reality. Discovered truth provides the means of judging the fitness of things in the universe, thus orienting a human being in temporality, without loosing sight of eternity. Suddenly the world appears to the human being as a significant whole, whose meaning needs to be interpreted. The cacophonous world of transient things suddenly transforms into “a sublime poem whose words are things, whose silent voice is the voice of the creator”14. Further we will discuss the theme of creation as a sign of God’s speech and revelation.

Have mercy so that I may find words (emphasis added).. .Lord God, tell me what you are to me. ‘Say to my soul, I am your salvation’. Speak to me so that I may hear. See the ears of my heart are before you, Lord. Open them and ‘say to my soul, I am your salvation.’ After that utterance I will run and lay hold on you. Do not hide your face from m e15. An ability to see the intrinsic meaning in the creation enables a human being to perform his/her own creative acts, namely to find words to fix the knowledge he/she discovered in the “region of dissimilitude”16. Moreover, as Augustine states, human praise of God is a way of knowing Him. By knowledge of God Augustine means close fellowship with Him, who speaks to the human heart. Augustine means in fact His possession in temporality. In the opening prayer to the Confessions Augustine says,

Nevertheless, to praise you is the desire of man (emphasis added), a little piece of your creation. You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself; and our heart is restless until it rests in you17.

What has anyone achieved in words when he speaks about you? Yet woe to those who are silent about you (emphasis added) because, though loquacious with verbosity, they have nothing to say18. In a sense, if speech is the creative spiritual power of God and the transformative power of Christ, human language is its express likeness spoken in the fallen world, or, we can add— the language whose content is full of praise and love for God, the Creator of all.

12 DGadM ii.8.10 13 In the Confessions i.3.3 Augustine notes, “In filling all things, you fill them with the whole of yourself.” 14 Mazzeo, J.A. op. cit. P. 183 15 Conf. i.5.5 16 See ibid. vii. 10.16 17 ibid. i.1.1 18 Ibid. i.4.4 85 We need to distinguish between speech as creative act of humans, and as desired mode of existence. In the Confessions Augustine identifies speech as the creative act of humans with praise and confession of the heart bom out of verbum mentis in silence19,

My confession before you is made both in silence and not in silence. It is silent in that it is no audible sound; but in love it cries aloud (emphasis added)20. In his works Augustine often uses the imagery of the “mouth of the heart 21 when he refers to the true speech. Its goal and domain is “the region of inexhaustible abundance 22, or the plenitude of truth and life23. “Plenitude” in Augustine is understood as fullness of knowledge, i.e. face to face, not in an enigma; and of being, i.e. the original condition of humanity before the Fall. Augustine uses want and thirst as opposites of fullness, emphasizing the fallen condition of the humanity, where the soul is coerced by the desires and pains of the body, and by external verbal signs, which are the necessary condition for the transmittance of knowledge, be it in the course of communication or interpretation. The measure of all abundance and fullness is the figure of Christ that is presented, in Augustine, as the object of our desire and the food of angels, and of all creatures of God, as is clear in the following passage:

‘Forgetting our past and reaching forward to what lie ahead’, we were searching together in the presence of the truth which is you yourself...We moved up beyond them so as to attain to the region of inexhaustible abundance where you feed Israel eternally with truth for food. There life is the wisdom by which all creatures come into being, both things which were and which will be24. Nourishment presupposes intaking of the food. In the same way the truth needs to be digested in the inner man in order to bring out the fruit of virtue. To conclude, as the express likeness of the creative act and power of God, human speech aims at restoring the creative acts of the human being. These are first of all the desire to possess the fullness of knowledge, i.e. to strive toward God’s presence in one’s life; and secondly to see the creation as a significant whole, i.e. a vestige of the Creator, whose meaning bids human mind to seek the truth within and through the voice of Christ, the only reliable truth in the transient creation.

19 See Colish, M. “St. Augustine’s Rhetoric of Silence Revisited.” In Augustinian Studies 9 (1978). Esp. p. 17 20 Conf. x.2.2 21 Ibid. ix. 10.24 22 Ibid. 23 DBV 4.32 24 Conf. ix. 10.24 8 6

Christ as Incarnate Word Reveals Meaning to Human Understanding; Is a Sign of God’s Presence to the World The most fundamental means for the knowledge of God, in Augustine, is Christ, the Incarnate Verbum. As noted in Chapter One, Christ is the second person of the Trinity, co-eternal with the Father. On the one hand, Christ is God, His speech by which He spoke the creation into being. On the other hand, after the fall and subsequent gap that grew between the eternal truth of God and the humankind, Christ is God’s Incarnate Verbum, revealing the truth about Himself and the Trinity as a whole to human understanding. Because God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, i.e. into the region of dissimilitude, human beings can restore their creative acts, namely— confessional speech25. Augustine notes in the following passage from the Confessions that although Christ, the supreme wisdom, is the Incarnate Verbum of God, he did not change in nature when He became man. Precisely because of His divine nature, He can renew the human being and the entire creation to the state of creaturely perfection:

But wisdom itself is not brought into being but is as it was and always will be...in this wisdom there is no past and future, but only being, since it is eternal...But what is to be compared with your word, Lord of our lives? It dwells in you without growing old and gives renewal to all things26. The Incarnate Verbum is the only true similitude and sign of God’s presence to the world. Several scholars have outlined the fundamental characteristics of the Incarnate Verbum in connection with Augustine’s theory of signification. M. Ferguson, for instance, stresses the characteristic of Verbum that makes it a perfect sign of God to the world, namely His co-eternal nature, “Christ is the only true ‘similitudo’ because His relation to God is one of genuine ‘simultaneity’, a simultaneity which can only exist outside of time”27. Christ is an ineffable Word of God that is beyond temporality. He is the supreme symbol, whose meaning cannot be corrupted by human utterances and the transience of this world. As linguistic meaning cannot be represented in words, only communicated; in the same way Verbum is not contained in the creation, but needs to be intuited from within. As a Sign of God, Verbum stands beyond the conventional rules of signification that govern human language. As such it serves as a perfect point of

25 See the discussion on praise as confessional speech on P. 81 26 Conf. ix. 10.24 27 Ferguson, Margaret W. op. cit. P. 861. See Sermo 194:3 87 reference for human cognition28. Kevin Hart, for instance, argues that, “since Christ is God, what He signifies is signified in and of itself’29. Verbum is not conveyed by words, but He is the one who conveys their meaning to mens. In his book Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century, M.D. Chenu outlines several characteristics of sign in Augustine, one of which is that “[t]he ‘sign’ conveyed knowledge. It might be secret or mysterious, but its intent was to make something visible.. .(the visible sacrament or mystery of an invisible form)”30. Although this description is primarily applicable to human words, this claim serves as a very important point for the purpose of Augustine’s doctrine of Incarnation. As mentioned earlier, in the fallen condition of mens knowledge/meaning needs to be communicated. Mediation is the result of the mutability of human language and mind’s dispersion in the external, i.e. things of the physical realm. As a result, truth needs to be externalized in order for meaning to be revealed in its entirety. The principle mediator of God’s truth to humanity is not language as it has fallen together with mens31, but the Incarnate Verbum.

It would not have been necessary for the Word to become flesh and to dwell among us. But, by the dust of sins, the interior vision had been blinded so far as grasping and enjoying that truth was concerned, and men no longer possessed the capacity of understanding the Word...Thus, the manifestation of the human nature of Christ is necessary for the faithful in this life so that they make their way toward the Lord32. The Incarnate Verbum is the actualized speech of God to the world, that teaches mens a new language of confession. In a sense Verbum is an exemplar of the confessional nature of true speech. The Incarnate Verbum is not just the sign of God’s presence to the creation, but is a means of return. In the Soliloquies Augustine says, “Father., .of the Intelligible Light, Father of our awakening and of our illumination, of the sign (emphasis added) by which we are admonished to return to thee”33. He dwells within human mens, and shapes it for the perception of God’s speech, the meaning of which is hidden in things as vestiges, or pointers to the Creator. In such a role Christ becomes a sign of true speech through which God’s will is communicated to creatures. In the Confessions Augustine says,

28 In her book The Mirror of Language, M. Colish gives a beautiful outline of the role of Incarnation in human cognition: “he [Christ] continued to affiliate man to God and thereby to transfigure the ordinary modes of human cognition and expression, while yet in time, into worthy vessels of his revelation” (P. 2) 29 Hart, Kevin, op. cit. P. 8 30 Chenu, M.D. op. cit. P. 125 31 Augustine says, “your word is itself corruptible, because it is of the same substance as the soul” (Conf. vii.2.3) 32 Sermo 264:5 33 Solil. i.1.2 8 8

I may find grace before you, so that to me as I knock may be opened the hidden meaning of your words. I make my prayer through our Lord Jesus your Son, ‘the man of your right hand, the Son of man whom you have strengthened’34. After his conversion, Augustine approached his friend Alypius and spoke a new language. He says, he [Alypius] contemplated my condition in astonished silence. For I sounded very strange [a sign of new language, Y.F.]. My uttered words said less about the state of my mind than my forehead, cheeks, eyes, color, and tone of voice.. .1 was deeply disturbed in spirit, angry with indignation and distress that I was not entering into my pact and covenant with you, my God, when all my bones were crying out that I should enter into it and were exalting it to heaven with praises...For as soon as I had the will, I would have had a wholehearted will. At this point the power to act is identical with the will. The willing itself was performative of the action35. The author intentionally plays with the terms “speech” and “silence” as he wants to show that the language of his conversion was the sincere speech of his heart. His actions equalled to his intentions, and thus the speech was indicative of his inner condition. There is a sense of simultaneity of his condition and the language he spoke, and that is what Augustine emphasizes as being a sign of true speech. In De Trinitate he repeats this thought by stressing that,

the Word of God...was made flesh...for the purpose that we might live aright by our w ord (emphasis added) following the pattern of his example; which means that in our word, whether in contemplation or in working, there be no manner of lie36. Therefore, truthful speech is indicative not only of human intentions, but the latter themselves become righteous when practiced in a right mode, i.e. of the living Word. In the Confessions Augustine strongly emphasizes true speech as an act of salvation and redemption of mens,

‘Young man, I say to you, arise;’ and then he would recover and begin to speak (emphasis added) and you would restore him to his mother37. In his Sermons Augustine relates Christ as God’s speech and human acts in terms of his multitude/similitude analogy, the same one we have noted in the theme of being and becoming in Chapter One. The Word of God is that which cannot be uttered by the word of man...The Word of God feeds many thousands of angels. They are nourished in mind; they are filled in mind...He fills the world...he says but little of Himself, but what He says means much: ‘I and the Father are one’. Do not count the words; weigh them. Why so? The plurality of words does not help in explaining the one Word (emphasis added)38.

34 Conf xi.2.4 35 Ibid. viii.8.19-20 36 D T xv.20.11 37 Conf. vi.1.1 38 Sermo 237:5 89 Therefore, language as express likeness of the creative act of God strives to express the Incarnate Verbum, and become His similitude. To summarize, Augustine develops an intemal/extemal dichotomy, which operates as the framework of other basic distinctions, namely, between eternity/temporality, instant/successive, spiritual/corporeal, multitude/similitude as the characteristics of God’s speech and human language. God’s speech in turn is the creative meaning-, and order-giving power and act of God in eternity. It is also God’s presence to the world in the form of the Incarnate Verbum that by virtue of His Incarnate nature “enables other signs to function as signs.”39 This enabling constitutes redeeming/transforming power of the Word in temporality by way of which the truth is mediated to human understanding, and whose meaning is operative in the visible community of believers. Language, identified with the external is the means of actualization and preservation of speech in temporality. It is the means of orientation of the human mens in the region of dissimilitude. Due to its natural capacity to signify, it points to the Creator/creation relationship, thus leading the mind beyond the region of transient signs. Here we encounter an interesting dynamic in Augustine. The mind itself is finite and subject to the laws of corporeal nature, and thus cannot escape the physicality of the corporeal realm. Truth however has been exposed to humans in the figure of Christ—the Incarnate Verbum, and when discovered internally, needs to be externalized, i.e. practiced in the community of believers. Mark Jordan emphasizes that, the knowledge of God, which Christ conveys to human understanding, needs a community (“fleshly”) within which it can become operative40. He particularly means the community of believers, who are faithful readers and doers of God’s signs in the creation. In De ordine Augustine says to his friend Alypius, “though I am your teacher of words, you, on the other hand, have become for me the exemplar of their practical content”41. Chenu also stresses in a slightly different way the social value of speech as “a juridical and mystical instrument and appurtenance of membership in the visible community”42. Augustine explains the social value of speech in terms of self- knowledge, and therefore readiness to receive truth. In the Confessions he says,

39 Jordan, Mark D. op. cit. P. 187 40 Ibid. P. 179 41 DO 2.10.28 42 Chenu, M.D. op. cit. P. 126 90

You have also given mankind the capacity to understand oneself by analogy with others, and to believe much about oneself on the authority of weak women. Even at that time [as a baby, Y.F.] I had existence and life, and already at the last stage of my infant speechlessness I was searching out signs by which I made my thoughts known to others43.

In the conclusion it is important to note that Augustine differs immensely from his predecessors, as for him the end of the redemptive speech is not wisdom as assent to knowledge, but Verbum as a mode of creaturely becoming, or lived truth. In the

Confessions he specifically stresses this point,

[T]he goal is but not how to get there and those who see the way which leads to the home of bliss, not merely as an end to be perceived but as a realm to live in44.

On the one hand, Augustine emphasizes the importance of lived truth, which needs to be made visible in the life of an individual, and not merely reduced to an object of meditation and pure thought. The primary purpose of the Incarnation is, thus, not knowledge, but interpretation of God’s will to humanity, and the proper means of communication between people.

On the other hand, because of the decisive moment of internalization of one’s journey toward God, Augustine’s distinction— internal/external transcends the sensible/intelligible dichotomy of Plato and Plotinus. As Augustine says in the

Confessions, the truth is uncertain until you enter into the close fellowship with the

One who is Him self the reliable truth.

In order to enter this fellowship, a human being needs to perform his/her own creative act of confession, which then brings him/her face to face with the truth of one’s self and thus of the image of God within,

Lord, you turned my attention back to myself. You took me up from behind my own back where I had placed myself because I did not wish to observe myself, and you set me before my face (emphasis added)...But the day has now come when I stood naked to myself, and my conscience complained against me: ‘Where is your tongue (emphasis added)? You were saying that, because the truth is uncertain, you do not want to abandon the burden of futility.. .This is how I was gnawing at my inner self45.

Therefore, according to Augustine, the end is not intelligible ideas, but vision of God

face to face in the light of Verbum as a Sign of God.

43 Conf i.6.10 44 Ibid. vii.20.27 45 Ibid. viii.7.18 91 Creation as a Sign of God’s Speech and Revelation. Meaning is Hidden from Fallen Mens As mentioned earlier, God’s presence to the creation has not ended with the fall. He continues to confer meaning upon reality, and sustain its being46. However, a human being does not recognize that meaning any more. He/she needs mediation and guidance. Kevin Hart gives a beautiful description of the human condition in the temporal world of change and transience,

No longer in harmony with God, this world becomes a chiaroscuro of presence and absence; everywhere one looks, there are signs of a divine presence that has withdrawn (emphasis added) and that reveals itself only in those signs. Whether in nature or scripture, these signs must be interpreted, yet only in ways which acknowledge that timeless wait behind them and can be separated from them...the sign is always a representation of a presence which precedes it, a passage from one presence to another, from infinite to finite mind47. As discussed in Chapter Three, the presence/absence distinction is crucial for Augustine’s theory of interpretation, particularly as regards the Scripture, which, according to him is a sign that enveils and reveals God’s truth to human understanding. It is a sign that extends over the faithful community for the purpose of providing the firmament of authority in temporality. In the Confessions Augustine puts a lot of stress on God’s absence in his life, when he says,

’My hope from my youth’, where were you, and where did you ‘withdraw’ from me? Did you not make me, and ‘make me superior to the animals, and make me wiser than the birds of heaven? I was walking through darkness and ‘a slippery place’. I was seeking for you outside myself, and I failed to find ‘the God of my heart’. I had come into the depth of the sea. I had no confidence, and had lost hope that truth could be found...’48. Later in the Confessions Augustine realizes that God has not forsaken him, that His presence was always there via the signs of His creative act— the speech of the creation that pointed to its Creator, and via the Interior Teacher that has taught Augustine the realities of things perceived as thoughts in the mind.

But you use all, both those aware of it and those unaware of it, in the order which you know— and that order is just. Out of my heart and tongue you made burning coals by which you cauterized and cured a wasting mind of high promise. Let silence about your praises be for the person who does not consider your mercies49. What’s interesting is that, he develops a net of interactions between the eternal realm of God and the temporal realm of becoming (i.e. transience) in virtue of his theory of

46 See DGadL 16.59 47 Hart, Kevin, op. cit. P. 4 48 Conf. vi. 1.1 49 Ibid. vi.7.12 92 signification, according to which God is present to the creation not directly, through Himself, but is mediated via various signs that possess meaning, and are actualized in the life of the creation, when understood by the mind. In fact, even transience itself, which is considered a flaw of the fallen creation, is used by God to reveal His will to human being,

Whatever God is said to begin or to cease to be must in no sense be understood in his nature, but in his creation, which obeys him in wondrous ways50. Thus, Augustine conceives all of creation as a vestige of the Creator that signifies the hidden or obscure meaning of God’s presence to the world, or, in other words, reveals the ways of God’s involvement in the creation. To follow Ferguson’s analogy, where the present is literally absent, the meaning of true speech is always figurative in the fallen condition of mens, and is thus absent. The only thing that is present to mens is the physical actualization of that meaning in words and other non­ verbal signs. It is important not to confuse language as a system of significant signs with the creation as a vestige of the Creator, where things stand in allegory, or “signify one thing from another”51. Some commentators have tried to reduce Augustinian signification to a theory of correspondence, where words stand for realities, for instance; or where things are indices of spiritual realities52. Augustine specifically emphasizes the conventional character of all language, and perceives things as pointers to their Creator, as His effects that convey the meaning of the Creator/creation relationship to the human mens. The creation is not representative of eternity; it reflects eternity in being its true image. Signs do not represent the truth of God; they communicate it in temporality, which was absolutely unnecessary in the original condition, where a human being embraced the truth, having seen it in direct perception. Augustine often stresses the fact that meaning is not changed when it is verbally expressed; such change is ontologically impossible. Witness the following passages:

In spite of the fact that this discourse is divided into words and syllables, you do not take individual particles of it as you do of food for your stomach, but you all hear the whole discourse and each individual takes in the whole53.

50 DGadL 5.19 51 D T xv.3.15 52 See Marcia Colish. op. cit. P. vii, 8, etc. 53 Sermo 187; also see DDC i. 13; iv. 161 93 Meaning belongs to the realm of eternity, it is one, and cannot be divided in temporality. Therefore, no multiplicity of signs can represent eternal meaning; it can only be passed in its entirety from one mind to another. As J.A. Mazzeo puts it,

Not only was the Scripture itself an endless allegory but the world that Scripture described was itself a further silent, wordless allegory of the eternal. The whole created world is a set of symbols of the divine, a sublime poem whose words are things, whose silent voice is the voice of its creator54. What Mazzeo suggests in his article is that the way things signify the Creator is similar to the way words signify reality, namely by allegory, or by analogy. Augustine often uses the term “enigma,” or reflection to signify this type of relationship. M. Colish gives an example of such a relationship as regards the soul and the Trinity,

In the context of Augustine’s sign theory, the soul, as an aenigm a, can be treated as a signum translatum, a thing acting as a sign...the soul as an analogy of the Trinity [is like] words as signs of nonsensible realities55. Thus, the nature of the relationship between words and reality, and between the creation and its Creator is the one of analogy not direct representation. There are many ways in which the creation signifies God’s will to the human mens. One of them is the beauty of the created world and thus of a human being as creature of God,

...if in human experience there were no intermediate stage whereby man might strive to rise above his earthly life and reach likeness to God, God in his ineffable mercy by a temporal dispensation has used the mutable creation, obedient however to his eternal laws, to remind the soul of its original and perfect nature, and so has come to the aid of individual men and indeed of the whole human race56. God speaks to His creature through the creation, using the beauty of the world to remind human beings of their superior nature57. He also uses the events in the life of humans to communicate His will.

if after this declaration they were to keep silence, having directed our ears to him that made them, then he alone would speak not through them but through himself58. In the Confessions Augustine tells a story of his childhood when his friend died, and he suffered the worst grief. God was silent then, He did not comfort young Augustine, and did not show him the true meaning of his friend’s death. But, as Augustine notes,

54 Mazzeo, J.A. op. cit. P. 183 55 Colish, M. op. cit. P.53 56 DVR x.19 57 As Eileen Sweenley suggests, “With the sense of exile comes the realization that the things around us have their value not for their own sake but from their ability to remind us of our exile and of the homeland which we seek; they become, in Augustine’s language, signs rather than things” (op. cit. P.78) 94

’God of vengeances’ and fountain of mercies: you turn us to yourself in wonderful w ays59. In another instance, Augustine tells us about his experience of the Catholic Church and in particular of his encounter with the teachings of Ambrose, the bishop of Milan.

Ambrose taught the sound doctrine of salvation...Nevertheless, gradually, though I did not realize it, I was drawing closer60. Unaware of God’s presence in His life, he was drawn nearer to Him through others. Monica, Augustine’s mother, also played a crucial role in his conversion, as she was constantly praying for his salvation. However, God did not answer the prayers of her mouth, but of her heart. As Augustine says, after Monica had a dream of the ruler, “How could this vision come to her unless ‘your ears were close to her heart’?”61. Thus, the events in the life of an individual are indicative of God’s presence in his/her life and of His continuous fellowship with His becoming. However, Augustine stresses that fellowship presupposes reciprocity and thus requires human response to God’s signs. As discussed in Chapter One, humans possess “an ‘intuitive’ knowledge of the truth,... which provides a standard by which to judge the inadequacy of all temporal utterance”62. By way of intuitive knowledge a human being can judge the beauty of the creation, and thus determine god-given signs. In order to have a developed intuition that discovers knowledge, a human being needs faith. Only by way of faith can one develop a true capacity for God. Faith, in Augustine, is a condition and possibility for the human act of true speech to happen, which, as determined above, transforms the human mens into a true similitude of God. In the beginning of the Confessions Augustine states,

calling upon you is an act of believing in you63. And,

‘I believe and therefore I speak’64. Therefore, if the will of God is communicated to human beings through the creation that in exhibiting a certain design, is a sign of God; and if the will of God is communicated through the events of one’s life that are indicative of God’s presence in the life of His becoming; then human response to and knowledge of God’s will

58 Conf. ix. 10.25 59 Ibid. iv.4.7 60 Ibid. v. 13.23 61 Ibid. iii. 11.19 62 Ferguson, Margaret W. op. cit. P. 861. D. Daniels holds the same position {op. cit. P. 46) 63 Conf. i.1.1 64 Ibid. i.5.6 95 happens by way of confessional speech, which prepares the human mens for the voice of God within human intuition and verbum mentis—the spiritual entity that is simultaneous with human intention.

IV.3. Characteristics of Human Language and Their Role in Human Becoming

Language as Temporality. Augustine’s Notion of Time Before we proceed with the theme of speech as metaphor of human becoming, it is important to discuss the basic characteristics of language that are significant for the theme of becoming. Language, in Augustine, has a temporal and successive nature, where one thing proceeds from another in sequential order. In Augustine’s view, it is a sign of the inferior nature of the fallen creation to the eternity of God, where sound has no beginning and no end, but is conceived in an instant, without leaving the speaker. As already discussed, the order of things that God has instituted in the beginning has been violated. However, the corporeal realm is not entirely deprived of order. In fact, time constitutes order in the fallen world, and provides a framework for God’s grace to be implemented in the life of each individual. Precisely for that reason, time is such an important category in the Augustinian philosophy of becoming. While providing a coherence of being, and thus a mode for human existence, time also serves as a borderline between the eternal and temporal realms65. As such time is a metaphysical category that is also conceived as a measure of change, and the horizon of the knowable for humankind. We should unpack this further. Augustine uses “time” in various ways. In the Confessions Augustine distinguishes four senses of “time”: In eternity...God is prior to all things; in time, the flower is prior to the fruit; in choice, the fruit is prior to the flower; and in origin, the sound is prior to the song66. On the one hand, time is a metaphysical entity that constitutes the measure of existence, and is a borderline between eternity and temporality. As a metaphysical entity time also constitutes the order of succession, diversity, and change in the world 67 . As such, it can be presented as a flow, duration in the form of past, present, and future. On the other hand, time is a subjective category, expressed, in Augustine, in the notion of “choice,” a category of human intention or moral obligation.

65 In DGadL 13.38, Augustine calls time a vestige of eternity 66 Conf. xii.29.40 67 Ibid. xii.19, 29 96 A human being does not know at once, the mind needs to compare things of the past and future, and discern their meaning in one’s life. Memory is the storehouse of human experiences, where time does not exist in succession, but is always present to the mind. In De immortalitate animae, Augustine outlines another characteristic of time as subjective category, namely its effect on human intentionality. He says,

Nor, is any body without parts, nor time without different intervals, nor may the shortest syllable be pronounced in such a way that you hear its end when still hearing its beginning. Moreover, what is done in the manner must be accompanied once by the expectation that it can be completed and also by memory, in order to comprehend the measure of its capacity. Expectation has to do with things of the future; memory, with those of the past. The intention to act lies in the present through which the future lapses into the past, and the outcome of the motion of a body, once started, cannot be expected without any memory68. Thus, time is a presence that preserves meaning for a human being to act upon. As such it is an extension of the mind alone. Time as a metaphysical entity is discussed in great detail in books XI and XII of the Confessions. Augustine starts with the nature and origin of time. There is past, present, and future. But, as says Augustine, the past is no more, the present is so short, that it cannot be captured and fixed, and the future is not yet. This paradox is solved by the conclusion that, by its nature time is just an extension of the mind, where it has a character of ever-presentness in a form of present-past, present-present, and present- future. Our mind either meditates or anticipates past and future events, and, in case of the present, there is a direct perception of the passing events69. Therefore, there are three key words that categorize time as a metaphysical entity in the Confessions XI— ’’successiveness,” “duration,” “extension of the mind,” and we can add a fourth one— ’’coherence.” The latter is connected with the view in Augustine that, time provides order in the world in which humanity is, and that such ordering is its primary purpose. It is in time that the soul is either saved or lost. It is in time that things possess motion and diversity70.

So when things rise and emerge into existence, the faster they grow to be, the quicker they rush towards non-being. That is the law limiting their being. So much you have given them, namely to be parts of things which do not all have their being at the same moment, but by passing away and by successiveness, they all form the whole of which they are parts71.

DIA 3:3 See Conf. xi.20 70 See ibid. xi.23 71 Ibid. iv. 10.15 97 By virtue of such features as discreteness and diversity a human being is capable of recollecting the inner word, and of seeing the totality of meaning present in the creation through the eyes of the soul, a totality that is eternal, thus breaking the boundary between God and creatures. Augustine uses a linguistic basis for measuring the length of time, namely by the duration of a syllable. He says that time cannot be captured by the movement of a body, as it can move faster or slower. Nonetheless, a syllable has a standard duration, and as such is a more useful tool for measuring time72. Linguistic expression becomes a perfect example of how time as a succession preserves unity of being and meaning in the fallen world,

The words we speak you hear by the same physical perception, and you have no wish that the speaker stop at each syllable. You want him to hurry on so that the other syllables may come, and you may hear the whole. This is always how it is with the sum of the elements out of which a unity is constituted, and the elements out of which it is constituted never exist all at the same moment. There would be more delight in all the elements than in individual pieces if only one had the capacity to perceive all of them73. D. Johnson emphasizes the allegorical relationship between the linguistic expression of human speech in time, and the self-expression of God in the eternal Word. He says, “the very contrast between our words and the Word might even suggest the basis of an analogy between the two, where our temporal soul expresses itself in temporal words, while the eternal God expresses himself in an eternal One”74. M. Ferguson proposes a distinction between the infinity of sequence, characteristic of corporeal reality that exists in a mode of negativity, i.e. “passing away and succeeding parts,” and the infinity of presence, characteristic of God’s realm75. Both commentators express a fundamental claim of Augustine that language as well as time preserves the coherence of meaning, and the totality of being in the postlapsarian world, though they are unable to preserve it all at once. In De genesi ad litteram he gives the following account of the problem,

...’producing seed according to their own kind and likeness’ and ‘whose seed is in it according to its likeness’ were appropriately said here, where the likeness of those being bom preserves the likeness of the one passing away76.

72 See R. Flores’s discussion on speaking and silence as measuring the duration of time in his “Reading and Speech in St. Augustine’s Confessions.” In Augustinian Studies 6 (1975). Pp. 1-13 13 Conf. iv. 11.17 74 Johnson, D.W. op. cit. P. 43 75 Ferguson, Margaret W. op. cit. Pp. 842-862. Esp. p.p. 844 and 853 76 DGadL 11.34 98 To emphasize the connection between temporality and language, I would like to cite Eugene Vance’s account of this problem. He defends the thesis that language, in Augustine, is indicative of the temporal world, or, more precisely, of temporality itself77 . Vance declares that Augustine’s physical theory of time is expressed not in the movement of the body, but in language “as the empirical foundation for his physics of movement and time”78. Unfolding in time language transcends temporality and signifies not what is physical and corporeal, but what is mental. Augustine’s favorite example of language as temporality being significant of eternity is poetry. A poem is preserved in the mind as simultaneous, but then when we recite, it unfolds in time in a sequence of phrases. Thus, poetry becomes a model of order and time in Augustine. As Eugene Vance notes, “poetry is capable of manifesting itself in time, an order that is not in itself temporal”79. Poetry overcomes temporality and brings the soul into harmony. Though itself not of corporeal nature, the soul is corrupted by the fallacious desires of the body, and thus is trapped in the region of dissimilitude. In his tractates De Genesi aduersus manichaeos, Augustine emphasizes the corrupting, but also healing power of time for the human soul, ...not only the visible, but also the invisible creation can perceive time. This is made clear to us with regard to the soul. We have proof that it is subject to change in time from the great variety of its loves and from the fall by which it became wretched and from the restoration by which it returns again to happiness80. Beside his poetic and linguistic analogies, Augustine takes the problem of temporality as becoming so as to interpret spiritually the life of an individual. This is especially clear in his autobiographical Confessions, where he uses the events of his life as vestiges of God’s presence in it. I believe that you wanted me to encounter them before I came to study your scriptures. Your intention was that the manner in which I was affected by them should be imprinted on my memory, so that when later I had been made docile by your books and my wounds were healed by your gentle fingers, I would learn to discern and distinguish the difference between presumption and confession.. ,81. Here he specifically emphasizes the role of events as vestiges of God’s grace organized in a certain sequence in the life of an individual, or a community, thus underlining the aforementioned characteristic of time, i.e. succession and preservation of the coherence of meaning accessed by way of meditation upon things past and

77 Vance, Eugene, op. cit. P. 20 78 Ibid. Pp. 21-22 79 Ibid. P. 30 80 DGadM ii.6.7 81 Conf. vii.20.27 99 present. But he also stresses that God uses time to reveal His truth to the human understanding when it seems appropriate, thus revealing the role of time not only in human intentionality, but in the acts of God as well. Thus, time constitutes a god- instituted ontological order of events in the temporal realm expressed in the directionality and successive character of language and memory82. Just as a poem unfolds in time in a certain order, and as words stand for things and not vice versa, in the same way the events of the past are signs of the future development of story of the creation, signs that can be perceived as God’s speech to humanity that, though spoken as an ineffable Word of God, are perceived by the mind in the course of becoming a true image of God, and that cannot be understood otherwise. Due to such a dynamic concept of time, his dichotomies— spiritual/corporeal, temporal/eternal, interior/exterior, multitude/similitude are concepts of a mobile relationship between the Creator and His creation. Although duration, directionality, and succession, i.e., the characteristics of human language and corporeal existence, are obvious obstacles on the way toward the knowledge of God and becoming a true imago D ei 83 , the image- and likeness-character of human mens with its ability to cogitate (bring together), and discern the truth with the help of the Interior Teacher, makes interpretation, and thus, return, in principle, possible. To summarize, with respect to time as successiveness, duration, and as an extension of the mind, we can underline two features: on the one hand, time is objectively ordered, and created by God; and, on the other hand, it is subjectively constrained, or measured by its impression in the mind84. Here we observe a tendency to move from the outside to the inside, and from the universal order to its impression in the mind. Time as objective category imprints the objective order on the memory and cognition of human mens. In other words, he moves from the coherence of meaning to the totality of being preserved in temporality85. In that is reflected God’s will for the humanity; and in virtue of the same characteristic, time provides the means of interpreting one’s life as a coherent journey toward becoming a true image of God, and toward the completion of the image that God had implanted in humans in the beginning. As such it provides for the possibility of the soul’s redemption already

82 Conf. xii. 15, 19 83 See M. Ferguson’s discussion of Augustine’s use of spatial language of return as an inherent flaw of language and temporality, op. cit. Esp. p. 853 84 Conf. xi.27 85 Ibid. xii. 15, 16 100 in temporality. As we can see, time is a sort of firmament, or a borderline that shapes the narrative of the Creator/creation distinction, and confers upon it directionality toward completion. On the other hand, it is due to this directional and successive nature of time that a human being is capable of preserving the impressions of past events in memory in a certain order, always reminding it of the journey-character of its being, thus placing it in its proper place. Thus, we have underlined three main characteristics of time, namely: (1) as a borderline between eternity and the corporeal realm of being, i.e. as a metaphysical category; (2) as a mode of human existence, i.e. as an extension of the mind that orients and preserves the coherence of human life-experience in temporality; (3) as an order- and meaning-preserving faculty of the development of the Creator/creation relationship that directs the process of becoming.

Speech/Language Distinction Before we continue with the order of becoming, I propose to outline the main characteristics of language and their role in the theme of becoming. It is important to distinguish between language and speech. According to Augustine, speech precedes language in the order of being. Understood as the creative act of God, or as His creative voice, it is the spiritual power of Christ, as Supreme Verbum, that brought the creation into existence. As such it remains operative in the world even after the Fall. Here he distinguishes between internal, or true speech and language, where the first is the power of Christ to transform the human mens by way of revelation and knowledge of the hidden ways of truth; and the second— a reflection of the fallen condition of a human being, i.e. his/her fallacious desires, shallow talks, and lies. In De uera religione Augustine provides an interesting analogy that can be used for the purpose of our discussion. He says,

The art of versifying is not subject to change with time as if its beauty was made up of measured quantities. It possesses, at one and the same time, all the rule for making the verse which consists of successive syllables of which the later ones follow those which had come earlier86. On the one hand, we can compare the notion of speech with the meaning of a poem, or the very life of things created, and language—with the verse, or the actualization of that hidden meaning, through verbal means. Moreover, speech is also compared with the rule, or order, if rhymed according to which, a poem can be called beautiful, i.e.

86 DVR xxii.42 101 combined of well-measured syllables, which cannot be shortened at will87. On the other hand, this passage is significant of the human being in his/her present condition as being deprived of God’s intended order, or displaced in the order of being.

we are not involved as parts in a poem, but for our sins we are made to be parts of the secular order88. Therefore, speech as transformative power of Christ serves the purpose of ordering a human being from within, and forming his/her imago Dei in the fallen transient world. In the Confessions Augustine says, “You pierced my heart with the arrow of your love, and we carried your words transfixing my innermost being”89. In De genesi ad litteram when describing the act of ordering the earth and heaven, Augustine proclaims, “...ordering them was the same as naming them”90, meaning that each thing possesses its proper order in the universe as every word has a proper definition, and every thing—its proper form, thus relating formation and formulation91. In Augustine, speech is indicative of the meaning of the word, and of the form of a thing signified by that word. In De musica he emphasizes the relationship by stating, “the thing is in the meaning [potestas]. Names are imposed by convention, not by nature”92. Speech is, thus, distinct from language in that it possesses the unifying power of bringing meaning together in the fallen condition of human mens where knowledge is possible not all at once, but by way of mediation via different significant means. In his Sermons, Augustine compares speech with the breath of life, when he says:

The meaning— which is like the soul of the sound that is made in uttering a word— cannot possibly be divided...the parts, considered separately, evidently retain some meaning and the breath of life (emphasis added), as it were... Just as the meaning of a word, without being extended in time, gave life, so to speak, and filled out the letters that take up slight intervals of time93. Notice the stress on meaning as the life of a verbal expression. I suggest that speech as the creative act of God is a life-giving principle of human language and being as such. Augustine often uses a metaphor of poem to emphasize the order- and life (meaning)-giving principle of speech in the life of humans.

87 See De musica vi. 10.27 88 DVR xxii.42 89 Conf. ix.2.3 90 DGadL 6.26 91 See DVR vi.l 1, xi.24, xlv.84 where Augustine talks of Word as the supreme form that gives and restores the form of things created, which is associated with their very being 92 De musica vi.9.24 102

So terrestrial things are subject to celestial, and their time circuits join together in harmonious succession for a poem of the universe94. Accordingly, every creature occupies a certain place in the order of being, which itself is good, as it provides the framework for the goodness of God to be expressed (see Chapter One). However, in the fallen world a human being forgot his/her place, and lost the capacity to discern the meaning of true speech, together with the capacity to distinguish between truth and falsehood (earlier defined as internal/external speech).

...it would not have been necessary for the Word to become flesh and to dwell among us. But, by the dust of sins, the interior vision had been blinded so far as grasping and enjoying that truth was concerned, and men no longer possessed the capacity of understanding the Word95. Christ is the only one that teaches human beings, and through the healing power of His speech a human being learns the confessional speech of faith:

[Christ] speaks to the heart and He admonishes from without; but He dwells within us so that we may be interiorly converted, so that we may be quickened by Him and formed after His pattern96. While speech is connected, in Augustine, with the act of creation and liberation, or redemption, language is the system of signs by which human beings convey and communicate meaning to each other, or in other words, by virtue of which any communication in human society is possible. Language is a response to the product of sin, and as such possesses successive and temporal nature. To draw a line between the two, speech is the creative act of God, and language is a human natural institution, i.e. a necessary and useful tool of human epistemology, in general, and knowledge of the way things are in the world, in particular, which serves as the means of orienting a human being in temporality. As Augustine states in the Confessions, understanding is ontological in man’s case, it is about man’s being.

This [ability for discernment] he [human being] exercises by virtue of the understanding of his mind, through which he ‘perceives the things that are of the Spirit of God.’ Otherwise, ‘man when he was in honor did not understand he has been compared to senseless beasts, and made like to them.’97 Augustine does not undermine the role of language in the life of human being and the entire creation. He sees its exclusive purpose in preserving the meaning of the relationship between the creation and the Creator, of communicating the truth of God

93 Sermo 32:67, 68 94 De musica vi. 11.29 95 Sermo 264:5 96 Ibid. 264:4 97 Conf. xiii.23.33. Consider another passage: “For, you, ‘in separating the precious from the vile,’ have become as the mouth of God” (Conf. xiii.20.2) 103 to the fallen creation. Thus, as M. Colish suggests, the role of language as a system of significant signs is primarily to point to the objective truth, thus providing a context and framework for human cognitive acts to happen. However, although language points to the Creator/creation relationship, it does not represent it any more. Nonetheless, Augustine believes that by discovering the rules by which language signifies meaning, a human being can discover the pattern, or the way of return to God in his present fallen condition. Mark Jordan suggests that Augustine provides the pathway from the “linguistic rule” to the “rule of faith” as condition and possibility of true interpretation, and to the knowledge of God through his theory of signification as signifying not only linguistic order, and thus the order of knowing, but the order of being as well. Thus, language is the means wherewith a human being seeks God within, and pre-figures the development of the creation story98.

IV.4. Redeemed Speech as Express Likeness of the Incarnate Word— Order of Becoming Once a human being has found his/her place in the world, he/she starts to speak a new language that is called “redeemed speech.” The notion of redeemed speech has been suggested by Marcia Colish in her book The Mirror o f Language,

Augustine projected a redeemed rhetoric as the outcome of a revealed wisdom. On the basis of this theory, a twofold linguistic transformation was in order: the faculty of human speech was to be recast as a Pauline mirror, faithfully mediating God to man in the present life; and the agencies appointed for the translation of man’s partial knowledge by faith into his complete knowledge of God by direct vision were to be redefined as modes of verbal expression". Colish stresses the crucial role of significant speech as mediator between God and humans, and as means and transmitter of the knowledge of God in the fallen condition, where truth is hidden from the direct perception of mens. As Colish emphasizes, partial knowledge by faith preserves the meaning intended for the creation, and thus serves as a mirror for human beings to anticipate the fullness of knowledge and the vision of God100. Consider the passages from the Confessions, which reveal Augustine own position,

See M.D. Chenu’s description of Augustine’s symbolic method in op. cit. Pp. 127-128 99 Colish, Marcia, op. cit. P. 16 100 See her article “St. Augustine’s Rhetoric of Silence Revisited.” op. cit. Esp. p. 15 104 even though we are the beloved of Thy Son, ‘it has not yet appeared what we shall be’...But, when He appears, we shall be like to Him, for we shall see Him just as He is: just as He is, O Lord, it is ours to see (emphasis added), but it is not yet for us101. In the beginning of the Confessions Augustine makes his plea to God to reveal Himself, Who will enable me to find rest in you? Who will grant me...that I forget my evils and embrace my one and only good, yourself?.. .Have mercy so that I may find words.. .Lord God, tell me what you are to me. ‘Say to my soul, I am your salvation’. Speak to me so that I may hear. See the ears of my heart are before you, Lord. Open them and ‘say to my soul, I am your salvation.’ After that utterance I will run and lay hold on you. Do not hide your face from me102. Here he specifically indicates that God’s speech to humans is His revelation, understanding of which is ontological in man’s case, as it restores the human capacity to see God, and to imitate His creative acts103. In De genesi ad litteram Augustine mentions “artful speech” as means of human participation in the creative act of God. He says, For although as we speak, some words pass away and others take their place, we should not believe that it happens this way in the very art by whose steadfast working there is produced an artful speech (emphasis added)104. “Artful speech” is a meaningful speech either of humans, or of God. As such it is perceived as an express likeness of the Word, i.e. Incarnate Verbum, the second person of the Trinity. In the Confessions Augustine suggests that, at the moment of conversion, which is associated in him with “artful speech,” i.e. from the bottom of the heart, the capacity to act upon one’s will is being restored, and that is precisely what finds its way out in the confessional speech, For as soon as I had the will, I would have had a wholehearted will. At this point the power to act is identical with the will. The willing itself was performative of the action105. Ralph Flores suggests an interesting interpretation, To confess, after all, is to use words truthfully: confession involves (ideally) a just application of words to the self. The disordered and deceiving self is reformed, partially at least, in confessing. Augustine, in confessing, informs or re-forms his life: he valorizes it by submitting sinful actions to present judgment and he textualizes it (or perceives it textually) by verbally placing it within the light of Providence and Scripture106.

101 Conf. xiii.16.18 102 Ibid. i.5.5 103 See ibid. xiii.21.31 104 DGadL 7.28 105 Conf. viii.8.20 106 Flores, Ralph, op. cit. P. 7 105

In his De Genesi aduersus manichaeos, Augustine tells us the story of the first sin, and he emphasizes that God forced Adam to confess his sin, when he was calling him• 107 . Confession and verbalization of one’s sin places the person in his/her proper order, thus serving as a point of reference or orientation of one’s self in the narrative of the creation. Therefore the confessional speech of humans at the moment of conversion is performative of his/her intention to return to God. In so doing it serves as a redemptive power of God, restoring human becoming to the condition of obedience and close fellowship that human beings enjoyed in the beginning. There is another aspect of redeemed speech that M. Colish analyzes, namely it restores the human ability to communicate and transmit God’s truth to others.

its role [consists] in deepening the believer’s knowledge of God and of himself, and its uses in communicating the fruits of contemplation to other believers...Human language reborn through the Incarnation, could now assist God in spreading the effects of the Incarnation to the world108. Thus, redeemed speech is one of the crucial notions in the process of human becoming an imago Dei. By transforming a human being into a true similitude of God, i.e. by recollecting him/her from the multiplicity of transient signs in the world of change and temporality, redeemed speech restores him/her to become a true sign of God’s speech, whose life now can be interpreted by others, and intuited in the context of the Scriptural story of the Creator/creation relationship. And finally, in the life to come speech is viewed, in Augustine, as a mode of human becoming. In the Confessions XIII Augustine suggests an imagery of the Joyful City as a future dwelling place of the one who becomes, i.e. whose speech acts are restored in Verbum.

But, now, no longer in his own voice, but in Thine, who has sent Thy Spirit from on high through Him who ascended on high and opened up the ‘flood-gates’ of His gifts, so that the stream of the river might make Thy City joyful109.

IV.5. Silence as the End of Human Becoming

Silence as Means of Revelation, and Condition and Possibility for Meaning to Take Place To distinguish between true, i.e. creative speech as an expression of the operative power of God’s grace in humans, and the corrupted language of the human tongue, Augustine introduces a third distinction, namely, between speech (or speech

See DGadM ii. 16.24 108 Colish, M. op. cit. P. 3 109 Conf. xiii.13.14 106 acts) and silence. Silence here is understood as the condition for meaning to be revealed to human understanding, as the condition for speech acts to take place, as the internalization of all language, and as its liberation from fallacies. I start with the first two, namely, silence as the condition for meaning to be revealed to human understanding, and as the condition for speech acts to take place. Although not fully developed, the theme of silence as the condition and possibility of becoming is, nonetheless, strongly present in Augustine. In De uera religione he says,

No one who is put on his guard can fail to see that there is no form or material thing which does not have some trace of unity, or that no material thing however beautiful can possibly achieve the unity it aims at, since it must necessarily have its parts separated by intervals of space (emphasis added)110. Thus, in the order of being things are separated by intervals of time, which reveal their order and unity in the transient world. Augustine puts a lot of stress on silence as time-interval, which serves as a background for an actualization of either speech or thought-formation. He specifically emphasizes this point in the Confessions,

It [sound] came and went. Did this make it more possible to measure? In the process of passing away it was extended through a certain space of time by which it could be m easured (emphasis added), since the present occupies no length of time. Therefore during that transient process (emphasis added) it could be measured... What we measure is an actual interval from the beginning to the end111. What is revealed in the process of transience is meaning. Paradoxically, it is precisely due to transience that meaning can be put together in the fallen world, and thus revealed to human perception or understanding. The paradox lies in the fact that meaning belongs to the eternal realm, and cannot be divided, but only transmitted or understood in its entirety. However, the human being, as a part of the created world, has fallen and violated the unity of being, thus falling into temporality and the world of change, where meaning ontologically has no place. But, as Augustine argues, God adjusts all kinds of means to help the human beings return to creaturely perfection. Thus, the creation becomes a sublime poem of significant signs that serves as orientation point for human becoming. A human being as imago Dei is capable of perceiving and understanding those signs and bringing them together in a unity, i.e. a significant whole only by virtue of silence that is an Augustinian middle-ground between absolute unity and chaos112. Therefore, silence is a background on which “the poem” develops in temporality. Marcia Colish even suggests that silence qua an

110 DVR xxxii.59 111 Conf. xi.27.34 112 Consider Augustine’s description of the vision at Ostia in Conf. ix.10.24 107 interval is a physical as well as temporal phenomenon. She uses musical phrase based on Augustine’s De musica to argue her position.

The human ear perceives the ‘time’ of a rest in precisely the same way that the ear perceives the ‘time’ of a musical note...In this respect, according to Augustine, silence is sensible, just as sound is sensible...The human ear experiences the musical phrase, including the rests it may contain, as a physical and temporal phenomenon113.

Silence as Means of Recollection and Internal Conversion If above we viewed Augustinian notion of silence as a condition for meaning to take place in temporality, here we are going to discuss another aspect of silence, namely— as a point of concentration, and internalization of human speech. If the first aspect of silence has more to do with how meaning is revealed in temporality to human perception and understanding, the second one is exclusively concerned with how human beings overcome temporality and reach supreme meaning, i.e. Christ, the supreme Verbum. In the Confessions Augustine describes his search for truth in terms of speech and silence, where silence is the expression of the inner process of becoming, thus reflecting the characteristics of true speech.

A s in silence (emphasis added) I vigorously pursued my quest, inarticulate sufferings of my heart were loudly pleading for your mercy. You knew what I endured; no human being knew. How little of it my tongue could put into words for the ears of my closest friends! Neither the time nor my powers of speech were sufficient to tell them of the full tumult of my soul. But all of it came to your hearing, how ‘I roared from the groaning of my heart, and my desire was before you, and the light of my eyes was not with me’. That was inward, while I was still in externals...I was superior to these external objects but inferior to you, and you are my true joy if I submit to you, and you have made subject to me what you created to be lower than me. This was the correct mean, the middle ground in which I would find health, that I should remain ‘in your image’, and in serving you be master of my body114. In Chapter One I have discussed Augustine’s use of likeness as a middle-term between absolute sameness and absolute otherness as the principle of creaturely existence. In the passage quoted silence is such a middle-ground of creaturely becoming, associated here with internal speech that a human being should learn from the Interior Teacher. In our dispersed condition (in temporality) here and now human language reflects the fallen character of the entire creation. Silence, on the other hand, becomes the medium that creates a condition and possibility for a human being to turn

113 Colish, Marcia. “St. Augustine’s Rhetoric of Silence Revisited.” op. cit. Pp. 21-22. Consider Augustine’s own account of the problem: “Mutability...enables periods of time to be perceived and distinguished by measurement” (Conf. xii.8.8) 114 Conf. vii.7.11 108 within115, and transform external speech acts into the true speech of the heart, seeking complete forgetfulness of oneself and concentration on the light within, the Teacher who speaks without sound and who transfixes the inner self from within, i.e. in silence116. Thus, while describing Monica’s and his vision at Ostia, Augustine emphasizes that, while we talked and panted after it [truth], we touched it in some small degree by a moment of total concentration of the heart (emphasis added)117. This is a classic quote from the Confessions, where the role of silence is most evident. On the one hand, it is a condition for human speech to transcend its temporality and reach the point of total concentration of the heart, or internalization of all speech into the silent speech of God within the human mens. However, in such a condition of total concentration and recollection, God still remains silent, but a human being starts to see His signs in the temporal world more clearly, and learns how to read them well. In the life to come, i.e. eternity, humans do not need signs and thus language as means of mediation of God’s truth to the humanity, as God Himself is present there, i.e. in direct perception. In the Confessions Augustine specifically alludes to readership as a condition of becoming proper, For, they [angels] see Thy face always and they read there, without temporal syllables, what Thy eternal will desires. They are reading, choosing, and loving; they read forever, and what they read never passes away. For, by choosing and by loving, they read the very immutability of Thy council. Their book is never closed, nor is their scroll rolled up, for Thou Thyself art this for them and art so eternally118. Thus, by transforming the language into silence, a human being learns to recognize the signs of the true speech in eternity, whereas by transcending language and temporality he/she gains direct access to the knowledge of God, expressed in Augustine in the notion of vision proper.

Silence as Condition of Vision Proper and the Mode of Eternal Becoming In De uera religione Augustine describes seven stages of human becoming, with the sixth stage resulting in complete transformation into life eternal, a total forgetfulness of temporal life passing into the perfect form which is made according to the image and likeness of God. The seventh is eternal rest and perpetual beatitude with no distinguishable ages...the end of

115 Joseph Mazzeo suggests that, “true rhetoric culminates in silence, in which the mind is in direct contact with reality” (op. cit. P. 187) 116 See Conf. ix. 10.25, xii.16.23 117 Ibid. ix. 10.24 118 Ibid. xiii.15.18 109

‘new man’ is eternal life (emphasis added)...the ‘new man’ is the man of righteousness119. Thus, the seventh, and final stage of human becoming is complete forgetfulness of temporality, and thus of language. M. Ferguson argues that, according to St. Augustine becoming is not the realization of a sequence of events, but is the end of succession in time and language120. By transforming language and time a human being transforms the fallen man, thus becoming a true image of God, “the man of righteousness,”121 whose will is the will of God. If in the fallen condition human will is blinded by the desires and passions of the body, in the condition of direct relationship with the Creator in eternity, human intentionality is restored by the knowledge of the only true object of human desires— God Himself. As Augustine argues in the Confessions,

there is a certain sublime creature which cleaves to the true and truly eternal God with such chaste love that, although not co-eternal with Him, it still does not loosen itself from Him and flow off into any temporal diversity and vicissitude, but reposes in the truest contemplation of Him alone (emphasis added)122. Accordingly, truly to be, for him, is to become. In the previous Chapters we saw what is involved in the process of becoming. Here I would like to demonstrate what comes in the end of the process of becoming. In short, becoming never ceases. In eternity becoming is not a progression, but is a condition of being. Augustine calls this condition a mode of rest, or eternal repose. Here we run into a paradox. How can becoming be eternal, or never-ending? And does not rest presuppose a static condition? Not if we consider that, in Augustine, becoming is the original condition of humankind. The end of becoming is not a transformation of human beings into something else, but is the restoration to their original state as a similitude of the Creator. Rest is the proper way of creaturely being, in Augustine. It is an eternal exploration of the end of becoming, i.e. vision proper.

how great Thou didst make the rational creature, for whom nothing whatever, less than Thee, is in any way adequate to provide for its happy repose (emphasis added), not even its very self123. God is an object of human knowledge and contemplation. He is the Creator of all, and thus is the biggest end in the hierarchy of being and knowing. It takes eternity to

DVR xxvi.49 120 Ferguson, M. op. cit. P. 862 121 DVR xxvi.49 122 Conf. xii.15.19 123 Ibid. xiii.8.9. Consider another passage: “In Thy Gift [Christ] we find our repose; there do we enjoy Thee” (Ibid. xiii.9.10) 110 know and experience Him. In this sense rest is not a static condition. But it is not a process either, as the process involves a progression. There is no succession and change in eternity. However, Augustine never defines eternity. He is rather concerned with the question of how is one who becomes in eternity, or eternally becomes.

Thy holiness lifting us up higher, because of the love of freedom from care, so that we lift up our heart to Thee, where Thy Spirit moves above the waters, and we may come to supereminent repose (emphasis added), when our soul will have passed through the waters which are without substance124. In the final books of the Confessions Augustine provides a beautiful analogy of a well-composed poem as a condition of human becoming in eternity, whose parts are well-measured, and as a totality exhibit the characteristics of harmony and, thus, true being.

When not well-ordered, they are restless; when they are in order, then they are at rest. My weight is my love; by it I am carried wherever I am carried. By Thy Gift we are inflamed and are carried upward; we are set on fire and we go. We ascend the ‘steps of the heart’ and sing a canticle of the steps...we go upward to the ‘peace of Jerusalem’... ’to abide there forever’125. It seems to me that Augustine is primarily concerned not with the question of the knowledge of God as the end of human becoming. It would be a contradiction. If God is the Creator of everything that is, then no created thing, including a human being, can possess the knowledge about Him. Nonetheless, a human being possesses a special quality in comparison with other created beings. This quality is ability to recognize and respond to the speech of God expressed in the harmony of the created order, and to properly be in it126.

124 Conf. xiii.7.8 125 Ibid. xiii.9.10 126 Ibid. xiii.35.50 Conclusion This thesis reflects my attempt to understand Augustine’s notion of becoming, specifically identified with a human being as imago Dei. Through my thesis I argue that speech as a mode of creaturely being in eternity finds its expression in human language, which preserves the totality of meaning and thus being in temporality. It does so in terms of his sign-theory with its complex mosaic of relationships between signs and things, and God as the thing proper, the final end in the hierarchy of being and knowing. In temporality though, speech as a creative act of humans and a mode of their conversion into a true similitude of the Creator, is discussed, in Augustine, in terms of faith. The act of believing is indicative of the act of knowing and loving the Creator. Augustine subordinates all knowledge to the impossible task of finding God in the fallen condition. Unlike philosophers of the Platonic school, who sought Intelligible Ideas outside the sensible world, Augustine’s Christian worldview establishes the framework of the fallen condition as the only possible way of knowing for human beings. He is a proper existentialist, in some sense. He develops the Plotinian method of introspection to establish a movement from outside inside, seeking the truth within human mens, where the uncorrupted image and likeness of God is. The mind then becomes for him a locus of human encounter with God, a spiritual entity, where the speech of God, i.e. Christ, the Incarnate Word is spoken teaching mens the art of discernment between signs and things in the hierarchy of being. The spiritual exercise of self-examination sets up a basis for Augustine’s theory of interpretation. Once humans learn to read the signs in the creation as pointing to the Creator, they can learn to transpose their own life into narrative significant of the Creator/creation relationship. An exemplar of such a relationship is laid out in the narrative of the Scripture, which possesses epistemic validity, and extends as a firmament of external authority over the faithful community judging the fitness of one’s life-experience in the context of the aforementioned relationship. While having its strong points, Augustinian introspective method has obvious downfalls. One of them is the problem of truth. There are at least four ways in which truth is used in Augustine. First of all, it is Christ, the supreme Wisdom of God. Secondly, it is the unmediated objective truth of God. Thirdly, it is the revealed truth 112 of the Bible, and fourthly—the discovered truth of the inner man. The problem does not necessarily lie in the variable use of the term “truth.” Rather it is an epistemological problem of learning. No matter how certain one is of the existence of the objective truth, no one can obtain the knowledge of it other than by mediation through the signs of the fallen creation. Even self-knowledge does not provide a solution, as it must emerge from introspection, with the fallen mens as its knowing agent. What we observe is a circular movement, which does not really solve Augustine’s problem of the knowledge of God by switching the attention from the external world of ambiguous signs to the internal self, which itself is only an obscure image of God. What is worthy of admiration, though, is Augustine’s honesty in posing philosophical questions, which he ultimately fails to answer. Thus, for instance, in the Confessions XI he addresses a very important question of memory as a storehouse of the images of human experiences and knowledge per se. If God cannot be found in memory and the mind of a human being, then how can one know Him. Augustine acknowledges that we can never transcend these two faculties, which, in fact, allow humans to cogitate, i.e. bring together their experience into an intellectual unity and knowledge proper. But when not mindful of God, a human being does not know God. In my thesis I suggest that silence as a metaphor of God’s speech sheds some light on this problem. While still a fallen creature, human beings cannot know God in a proper sense. They rather possess a capacity for God through the original image and likeness present in them in principio. By exercising their faith-acts, which, as I argue, are speech acts proper, humans open up for Christ, the Interior Teacher, to take possession of their heart, who prepares them for eternity, and the vision proper. Although humans cannot grasp the totality of meaning in the world of transient signs, they can recognize it through the unspoken Word of God. Silence is the perfect root metaphor to explain this relationship. Augustine uses silence as a bridge between obvious and obscure, literal and figurative, absent and present, etc. Although silence cannot provide humans with the absolute knowledge, it serves as a mode of becoming, which presupposes complete forgetfulness of the sinful ways. It provides an opportunity for self-recollection, and bringing one’s life into harmony with the divinely established order in the universe, which Augustine always associates with the condition for meaning to be revealed to human understanding. 113 Another problem that I would like to analyze is Augustine’s tendency to conflate the temporal and atemporal meanings, and modes of being. Thus, for instance, he jumps from the question of epistemology in the fallen condition to epistemology proper, without really distinguishing between the two. By establishing the inferential relationships between things and signs, and by discussing their apprehension by the mind, he tries to establish a pattern of thinking according to which humans operate linguistically and ontologically in the postlapsarian world. However, his general philosophical discourse is subjected to discovering how humans become in temporality, with the view for anticipating God in eternity. He establishes some interesting connections, but it seems his general methodology does not quite get at the core of his question. Thus, for instance, he develops a theory of inferential relationships between things and signs, and a hermeneutical practice of distinguishing between signs and things proper in the hierarchy of being, all with the view to discovering how human beings as imago D ei reach an unmediated knowledge of God. I think, this way he conflates knowledge in temporality with the one in eternity, hoping that they somehow relate, and that by analogy with human epistemology in the postlapsarian world one can understand the way humans are to know God in eternity. The negative theology of Augustine cannot provide positive answers, but only suggest speculative solutions. The same applies to the problem of interpretation. Augustine asks a very important question, namely, can we reach true understanding, and if so how much of it can our language convey, and is language capable of sustaining the truth of God at all? He provides two solutions, figurative interpretation as a sign of true interpretation, and faith as a mode of knowing. In the De Magistro he strongly emphasizes the role of the Interior Teacher as the one that interprets the truth for human understanding in the inner man. The answers he gives, it seems, are in line with his Christian views. However, if we look at the detailed discourse of his sign- theory, one would realize that he did attempt to resolve the question of linguistic representation, but not on linguistic grounds. This and other conflations create an immense tension in his philosophy, thus making it limited in many ways. Overall, I do appreciate Augustine’s rhetorical mode as a tool of philosophic discourse. I find his use of root metaphors most helpful and original. At the end I would like to add that I really enjoyed working on Augustine. I found his method of personal dialogue and meditation a very useful tool of philosophical investigation. Bibliography Augustine’s texts:

Of True Religion', translated by J.H.S. Burleigh. Chicago: Regnery, 1966.

“The Soliloquies.” In Augustine: Earlier Writings. Library of Christian Classics Series; translated by John H.S. Burleigh. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953.

“The Teacher.” In Augustine: Earlier Writings. Library of Christian Classics Series; translated by John H.S. Burleigh. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953.

“On Faith in Things Unseen.” In Writings of Saint Augustine. The Fathers of the Church Series. Vol. 2. Translated by Ludwig Schopp. New York: Cima Publishing Co., Inc., 1947.

“The Immortality of the Soul.” In Writings of Saint Augustine. The Fathers of the Church Series. Vol. 2. Translated by Ludwig Schopp. New York: Cima Publishing Co., Inc., 1947.

“The Magnitude of the Soul.” In Writings of Saint Augustine. The Fathers of the Church Series. Vol. 2. Translated by Ludwig Schopp. New York: Cima Publishing Co., Inc., 1947.

“Answer to Sceptics.” In Writings of Saint Augustine. The Fathers of the Church Series. Vol. 1. Translated by Denis J. Kavanagh. New York: Cima Publishing Co., Inc., 1948.

“Confessions.” In The W orld’s Classics Series’, translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

“Divine Providence and the Problem of Evil.” In Writings of Saint Augustine. The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation Series. Vol. 1. Translated by Robert P. Russell. New York: Cima Publishing Co., Inc., 1948.

“Genesis Against the Manichees.” In Saint Augustine. The Fathers of the Church Series', translated by Ronald J. Teske. Washington: The Catholic University Press, 1991.

On Christian Teaching', translated by R.P.H. Green. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

“On Dialectic.” In Synthese Historical Library: Texts and Studies in the History of Logic and Philosophy, translated by B. Darrell Jackson. Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1975.

“On Free Choice of the Will.” In The Library o f Liberal Arts', translated by Anna S. Benjamin. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1964. 116

“On Music.” In Writings of Saint Augustine. The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation Series. Vol. 2. Translated by Robert Catesby Taliaferro. New York: Cima Publishing Co., Inc., 1947.

“On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis: An Unfinished Book.” In Saint Augustine. The Fathers of the Church Series; translated by Ronald J. Teske. Washington: The Catholic University Press, 1991.

“On the Profit of Believing.” In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Series. Vol. III. Translated by the Rev. C.L. Cornish. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1956.

“Sermons on the Liturgical Seasons.” In The Fathers of the Church Series. Vol. 38. Translated by Sarah Muldowney. New York: Fathers of the Church, 1959.

“The City of God Against the Pagans.” In Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought; edited and translated by R.W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

“The Happy Life.” In Writings of Saint Augustine. The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation Series. Vol. 1. Translated by Ludwig Schopp. New York: Cima Publishing Co., Inc., 1948.

“The Trinity.” In Augustine: Later Works. Library of Christian Classics Series. Vol. VIII. Translated by John Burnaby. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1955.

Secondary Sources:

A Companion to the Study of St. Augustine', edited by Roy W. Battenhouse. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.

Baker, Peter Harte. “Liberal Arts as Philosophic Liberation: St. Augustine’s De Magistro." In A us Libéraux et Philosophie Au Moyen Âge. Montréal: Institut d’Études Médiévales, 1969.

Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: a Biography. London: Faber, 1967.

Burnyeat, M.F. “Wittgenstein and Augustine De M agistro In The Augustinian Tradition', edited by Gareth Matthews. London: University of California Press, 1999. Pp. 286-303.

Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, edited by A.H. Armstrong. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.

Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: a Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Chenu, Marie-Dominique. Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century', edited and translated by Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. 117

Chivers, Francis J. “Wordsworth’s ‘Real Language of Men’ and Augustine’s Theory of Language.” In Augustinian Studies 14 (1983). Pp. 11-25.

Colish, Marcia. “St. Augustine’s Rhetoric of Silence Revisited.” In Augustinian Studies 9(1978). Pp. 15-24.

Colish, Marcia L. The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge. Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

Colish, Marcia. “The Stoic Theory of Verbal Signification and the Problem of Lies and False Statements from Antiquity to St. Anselm.” In L ’archéologie de sugne; edited by L. Brind’ Amour et E. Vance, 1982. Pp. 26-36.

Daniels, Donald E. “The Argument of De Trinitate and Augustine’s Theory of Signs.” in Augustinian Studies 8 (1977). Pp. 33-54.

Ferguson, Margaret W. “Saint Augustine’s Region of Unlikeness: The Crossing of Exile and Language.” In The Georgia Review 29 (Fall 1975). Pp. 842-862.

Flores, Ralph. “Reading and Speech in St. Augustine’s Confessions.” In Augustinian Studies 6 (1975). Pp. 1-13.

Gilson, Etienne. Being and Some Philosophers. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1949.

Gilson, Etienne. The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine. New York: Random House, 1960.

Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault; edited by Arnold Davidson; translated by Michael Chase. Oxford; New York: Blackwell, 1995.

Hart, Kevin. The Trespass of the Sign. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Henry, Paul. “Augustine and Plotinus.” In Journal of Theological Studies 38 (1937). Pp. 1-23.

Jackson, B. Darrell. “The Theory of Signs in St. Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana.” In Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays; edited by R.A. Markus. New York: Anchor Books Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972. Pp. 93- 150.

Johnson, Douglas W. “Verbum in Early Augustine.” In Recherches Augustiniennes VIII (1972). Pp. 25-53.

Jordan, Mark. D. “Words and Word: Incarnation and Signification in Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana In Augustinian Studies 11 (1980). Pp. 177-196. 118

Jordan, Robert. “Time and Contingency in St. Augustine.” In Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays; edited by R.A. Markus. New York: Anchor Books Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972. Pp. 255-279.

Mallard, William. Language and Love: Introducing Augustine’s Religious Thought Through The Confessions Story. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvanian State University Press, 1994.

Markus, R.A. “St. Augustine on Signs.” In Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays; edited by R.A. Markus. New York: Anchor Books Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972. Pp. 61-91.

Markus, R.A. Signs and Meanings: World and Text in Ancient Christianity. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996.

Matthews, Gareth B. “Augustine on Speaking from Memory.” In Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays; edited by R.A. Markus. New York: Anchor Books Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972. Pp. 168-175.

Matthews, Gareth B. “The Inner Man.” In Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays; edited by R.A. Markus. New York: Anchor Books Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972. Pp. 176-190.

Mazzeo, Joseph Anthony. “St. Augustine’s Rhetoric of Silence.” In Journal of the History of Ideas 23 (1962). Pp. 175-196.

McCool, Gerard A., S.J. “The Ambrosian Origin of St. Augustine’s Theology of the Image of God in Man.” In Theological Studies 20 (1959). Pp. 65-81.

Miethe, Terry L. “St. Augustine and Sense Knowledge.” In Augustinian Studies 8 (1977). Pp. 11-19.

Miles, Margaret. “Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine’s De Trinitate and Confessions.” In Journal of Religion 63 (1983). Pp. 125-142.

Nussbaum, Martha. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.

O’Daly, G.J.P. “Sensus interior in St. Augustine, De libero arbitrio 2.3.25-6.51.” In Studia Patristica 16.2 (1985). Pp. 528-532.

Pepper, Stephen. World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1942.

Pepper, Stephen. “Metaphor in Philosophy.” In The Journal of Mind and Behavior 3.3 (1982). Pp. 197-204. 119

Stock, Brian. Augustine The Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation. Cambridge; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.

Sweenley, Eileen C. “Hugh of St. Victor: The Augustinian Tradition of Sacred and Secular Reading Revised.” In Reading and Wisdom: The De Doctrina Christiana of St. Augustine in the Middle Ages; edited by Edward D. English. Notre Dame; London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. Pp. 61-78.

Teske, R. “The Image and Likeness of God in St. Augustine’s De Genesi ad Litteram Liber Imperfectus.” In Augustinianum 30 (1990). Pp. 441-451.

Vance, Eugene. “Language as Temporality.” In Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes', edited by John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. London: University Press of New England, 1982. Pp. 20-35.

Zoolalian, David E. “Augustine and Wittgenstein.” In Augustinian Studies 9 (1978). Pp. 28-40.